Unexpectedly for everyone, scientists have discovered a new way to manipulate electrical charge. The study was named 'new phase of matter'. The effect was discovered by the scientist Swastik Kar, associate professor of physics at Northeastern University (USA).
'This is the limit of our imagination! The discovery could change the way signals are detected and transmitted. In addition, it can change the way we perceive things, store information and possibilities that we might not even have thought about. '
The point is that the ability to move, manipulate, and store electrons is the key to the vast majority of modern technology. In a new article published in the Nanoscale edition, the researchers described a way to get electrons to do something completely new – to distribute themselves evenly in a stationary crystal pattern.
'I would like to say that this is almost like a new phase of matter. It is completely electronic.
The phenomenon began when researchers experimented with crystalline materials only a few atoms thick, known as two-dimensional materials.
Such materials are built in a repeating pattern of atoms, so their thin electrons can only move in two dimensions. Stacking these ultra-thin materials can create strange effects because the layers interact at a quantum level.
Professor Kar's team studied two such two-dimensional materials: bismuth selenide and transition metal dichalcogenide, stacked on top of each other like sheets of paper. As a result of the experiments, they discovered something really strange.
The electrons have to repel each other because they are negatively charged and move away from other negatively charged things. However, this is not what the electrons in these layers were doing, instead they formed a stationary third structure.
'At certain angles, these materials seem to form a way to share their electrons, which ultimately forms this geometric lattice at regular intervals. We get a perfectly repeatable array of pure electron bunches that sit between two layers. '
The team initially assumed that the result was a mistake. The crystal structures of two-dimensional materials are too small to be observed this way, so physicists use special microscopes that emit beams of electrons instead of light. When electrons pass through a material, they interfere with each other and create a pattern.
Using complex mathematics and this specific pattern, scientists tried to recreate the shape of a two-dimensional material. When the resulting pattern revealed a third layer that could not appear in either of the other two, the researcher assumed that something went wrong during the creation of the material or during the measurement.
Despite the fact that similar phenomena were observed before, it was only at extremely low temperatures, while the observations of the researchers were at room temperature. But after repeated testing and experiments conducted by doctoral student Zacharia Hennigausen, the results remained the same.
Thus, a new picture of charged spots in the form of a lattice appeared in two-dimensional materials. And this picture has changed taking into account the orientation of the above layers. Arun Bansil, a distinguished professor of physics at Northeastern University, believes that this phenomenon is caused by the fact that electrons in the material are constantly bouncing:
This is because they are attracted by the positively charged atomic nuclei and repelled by other negatively charged electrons. But in this case, there is something in the way these charges are arranged – it is the combination of electrons in a certain pattern.
They create these regions where there are, if you will, some kind of 'ditches in the potential landscape', which are enough to make these electrons create these bunches of charge. The only reason electrons become clumps is because there is a potential hole in there. '
