Graphene, also known as the wonder material, shows yet another sign of innovation. Scientists were able to turn it into a new kind of superconductor by putting two graphene layers on top of one another to conduct electrons.
The best part? Zero resistance.
Electricity with no resistance could be a groundbreaking turning point for the landscape of electronics. If it's somehow possible to consume less energy to move electric charge, electronics could perform more efficiently and be less expensive to run. This saves energy costs and might even help researchers come up with better quantum computers.
So how was this possible? Well, according to a group of researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Japan's National Institute for Materials Sciences, it's all because of a slight twist. The incredible thing about this slight twist is that the researchers stumbled upon it by accident.
"It was a very unexpected discovery, having worked with graphene for a long time," said Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an MIT scientist, noting that what they had created has "very similar characteristics to high-temperature superconductors that remain to be understood."
They were actually exploring what an orientation known as the "magic angle" — 1.1 degrees — would do to graphene. There are theories suggesting that offsetting atoms in layers of 2D material would cause interesting electron behavior — but scientists had no idea what "interesting" in this sense meant.
The researchers put two sheets of graphene, applied a small electric field, and they realized it had become a superconductor. They tried other experiments to see if they would get the same results. They did. Graphene continued to exhibit these properties in other experiments.
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