A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observed that the electrons display a strange behavior when five layers of graphene are sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride.
Instead of their usual -1 charge, the electrons display part charges such as -⅔ or -⅗. This has been dubbed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) and has physicists around the world excited.
This is not the first time researchers have seen strange behaviors from electrons. When materials are cooled to absolute zero temperatures, their resistance becomes quantized.
Electrical resistance is typically observed in the same direction as the current flow. The material encounters one more resistance, which runs perpendicular to the current, known as transverse resistance.
The transverse resistance gets quantized and can occur in multiples of electron charge, such as 1,2,3, etc. These materials maintain the same traverse resistance as the charge density increases. This is known as the quantum Hall effect and is analogous to vehicles moving at the same speed on a highway even when traffic increases.
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