A UA-led collaboration of physicists and chemists has discovered that temperature behaves in strange and unexpected ways in graphene, a material that has scientists sizzling with excitement about its potential for new technological devices ranging from computing to medicine.
Imagine setting a frying pan on the stove and cranking up the heat, only to discover that in a few spots the butter isn't melting because part of the pan remains at room temperature. What seems like an impossible scenario in the kitchen is exactly what happens in the strange world of quantum physics, researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered.
The findings, published in the scientific journal Physical Review B, suggest that quantum effects play a role in how heat moves through a material, challenging that classic notion that heat simply diffuses from a hot spot to a cold spot until the temperature is the same throughout.
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