A team of researchers has revealed that sonic boom and Doppler-shifted sound waves can be created in a graphene transistor, giving new insights into this world-famous material and its potential for use in nanoscale electronic technologies.
When a police car speeds towards you and passes by with its siren blaring, you can hear a distinct change in the frequency of the siren's noise. This is the Doppler effect. When a jet aircraft's speed exceeds the speed of sound (about 760 mph), the pressure it exerts upon the air produces a shock wave which can be heard as a loud supersonic boom or thunderclap; this is the Mach effect.
Scientists from Loughborough, Nottingham, Manchester, Lancaster and Kansas universities have discovered that a quantum mechanical version of these phenomena occurs in an electronic transistor made from high purity graphene. Their new publication, Graphene's non-equilibrium fermions reveal Doppler-shifted magnetophonon resonances accompanied by Mach supersonic and Landau velocity effects, has been published today in Nature Communications.
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