It was March 2018. Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society It was expensive at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The session was moved to the atrium to accommodate the crowds, but people still had to pack onto the balconies to see the action.
there was a rumor that Pablo Jarilo Herrero, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made a critical report. He and his colleagues were experimenting with graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, exfoliated from the graphite contained in the lead of a pencil. Graphene was already celebrated for its various promising electronic properties, and many more.
Here Jarillo-Herrero showed that by stacking two graphene sheets and twisting or rotating one with respect to the other at a certain “magic angle”, you can: make the material an insulatorwhere little current flows, or superconductor, where the current flows with zero resistance. This was a marvelous trick and potentially very important, as superconductivity holds promise for applications ranging from quantum computing to nuclear fusion.
Since then, researchers have used twisted graphene to generate all sorts of exotic quantum effects, including “quasiparticles” that manifest as magnetic vortices or exhibit strange electronic properties. “The exciting thing about these systems is that they have amazing potential,” he says. Amir Jacoby at Harvard University.
What’s even more exciting is that we are just beginning this journey. We are now delving deeper into the wild new physics that lurk inside two-dimensional materials by inserting more sheets of graphene or replacing them with sheets of other materials to produce similar effects.
…Research
