Is Space Like a Chessboard?

Physicists at UCLA set out to design a better transistor and ended up discovering a new way to think about the structure of space.

Space is usually considered infinitely divisible -- given any two positions, there is always a position halfway between. But in a recent study aimed at developing ultra-fast transistors using graphene, researchers from the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute show that dividing space into discrete locations, like a chessboard, may explain how point-like electrons, which have no finite radius, manage to carry their intrinsic angular momentum, or "spin."

While studying graphene's electronic properties, professor Chris Regan and graduate student Matthew Mecklenburg found that a particle can acquire spin by living in a space with two types of positions -- dark tiles and light tiles. The particle seems to spin if the tiles are so close together that their separation cannot be detected.