14 DAY TRIAL // A collaboration of physicists from the United States announces the development of designer electrons, tunable elementary particles that could theoretically be used to develop new classes of materials and electronic devices.
The exotic variants of regular electrons were created individually. Scientists drew inspiration from the structure of graphene, a 2D carbon compound that comes in one-atom-thick sheets. The material has exquisite physical and chemical properties, and could replace silicon as a basis for all electronics.
The new work was carried out by a joint team of scientists, from the Stanford University and the US Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. They say that the study produced the first-ever system of designer electrons.
The investigation was led by expert Hari Manoharan, who holds an appointment as an associate professor of physics at Stanford, and is also a member of SLAC's Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science.
“The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies. We're now able to tune the fundamental properties of electrons so they behave in ways rarely seen in ordinary materials,” the team leader says.
Details of the research effort were published in the March 14 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
The new electrons were obtained by placing individual carbon monoxide molecules on a perfectly smooth copper surface. The elementary particles had graphene electron-like properties at first. However, they displayed no mass, and were able to travel at the speed of light through the material.
The team then went on to change the arrangement of individual CO molecules, forcing the graphene-like electron flow to shift its patterns as well. When defects or impurities were introduced into the system, it became even easier to control the properties of the trapped electrons.
“One of the wildest things we did was to make the electrons think they are in a huge magnetic field when, in fact, no real field had been applied,” Manoharan explains. His work was supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation.
“Our new approach is a powerful new test bed for physics. Molecular graphene is just the first in a series of possible designer structures. We expect that our research will ultimately identify new nanoscale materials with useful electronic properties,” he concludes.
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