When I wrote about superconductors and called them “the technology that will change everything”, I couldn’t help but feel an itch in the back of my mind — a vague notion that graphene and superconductors had a deeper relationship that hadn’t yet been explored. Both were materials which held a rightful fascination in the world of physics, each for their own extraordinary set of properties.
At times graphene had even been referred to as the most remarkable substance ever discovered. It was a honeycomb pattern of carbon exactly one atom thick. The thinnest material known to man, and yet 150 times stronger than steel, flexible, and electrically conductive. Superconductors, on the other hand, are materials that would solve the major problem of heat loss during electrical transmission across wires. They show no electrical resistance. For us, this would mean computers that are smaller and yet more powerful, a revolution in the fields of medicine and transportation, and energy savings worth billions of dollars each year. Superconductors may even be the key to sustaining powerful fusion reactions that could power the world.
But what if with some clever manipulation you could marry both these powerful materials? The result is a new field of science called “twistronics”, and yet one which has already attracted a lot of attention and new research. What amounts to a few dozen groups working in the field today could soon become hundreds. The researchers themselves admitted that they could never have anticipated the enormous potential twistronics have shown.
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