The strange quantum effects of twisted, graphene-like materials

Superconductivity, fractional charges and magnetic vortices are conscionable immoderate of the weird quantum phenomena lurking successful materials similar graphene erstwhile they get skewed

Physics 30 November 2022

By Philip Ball

Marcus Marritt

IT WAS March 2018. The ambiance astatine the annual gathering of the American Physical Society astatine the Los Angeles Convention Center was highly charged. The league had been moved to the atrium to accommodate the crowds, but radical inactive had to cram onto the balconies to get a presumption of the action.

Rumours had it that Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, a physicist astatine the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had thing momentous to report. He and his colleagues had been experimenting with graphene, sheets of c conscionable a azygous atom heavy that are peeled from the graphite recovered successful pencil lead. Graphene was already celebrated for its assorted promising physics properties, and overmuch much besides.

Here, Jarillo-Herrero showed that if you stacked 2 graphene sheets and twisted, oregon rotated, 1 comparative to the different astatine definite “magic angles”, you could make the worldly an insulator, wherever electrical existent hardly flows, oregon a superconductor, wherever existent flows with zero resistance. It was a staggering trick, and perchance hugely important due to the fact that superconductivity holds committedness for applications ranging from quantum computing to atomic fusion.

Researchers person since utilized twisted graphene to make each mode of exotic quantum effects, including “quasiparticles” that tin manifest arsenic magnetic vortices and different grounds bizarre physics properties. “What’s breathtaking astir these systems is that they clasp immense imaginable for surprise,” says Amir Yacoby astatine Harvard University.

Even much breathtaking is that we person hardly started connected this journey. Now, by inserting much sheets of graphene oregon swapping successful sheets of different materials to nutrient akin effects, we are delving deeper into the chaotic caller physics lurking wrong two-dimensional materials.

Studies of …