Using a new slow-motion electron camera, physicists from Regensburg, Marburg and Jülich revealed how intense electric fields drive electrons in graphene, causing them to jump across energy gaps in a seemingly paradoxical manner. This was made possible by a novel combination of laser technology and electron microscopy.
The electrons' behavior is roughly equivalent to riding an elevator where the floor indicator suddenly jumps from "1," "2," and "3" to "20." You never passed through the 17 floors in between, yet you arrive on the 20th floor. What sounds like an impossible leap is actually possible in the quantum world. Such processes are called Landau-Zener-Majorana transitions. It has long been suspected that these transitions could play an increasingly important role in high-speed semiconductor electronics.
A research team from the University of Regensburg, Philipps-Universität Marburg and the Forschungszentrum Jülich has succeeded in visualizing the ultrafast dynamics of such transitions in the material graphene. The team reports on this achievement in its latest study, published in the journal Nature.
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