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Twisted graphene has become the big thing in physics
- tengbretson 8y agoIt's great that now that regular graphene has become ubiquitous and has delivered on all of its promises to revolutionize tech we have something new to look forward to.
- codr7 8y agoIt's the future, and always will be :)
- ianai 8y agoIs there a list of devices regular graphene has made possible?
- rishav_sharan 8y agoI believe he is being sarcastic
- dundercoder 8y agoRats. I got excited for a second.
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- keyle 8y agoPardon my interruption but I searched for 'use' or 'usage' and came up empty. Anyone can tell a regular guy why it's a big deal and what are the applications? ta
- dbqpdb 8y agoIt seems to have a very real potential to help us learn a great deal about superconductivity.
- DuskStar 8y agoResearch. It's a relatively simple setup with relatively easy to control properties, that does something really fucking weird. It offers a window into the behavior of other poorly understood superconductors, and that offers the eventual chance of higher temperature or higher magnetic flux superconductors. Either would be revolutionary - room temperature superconductors have obvious applications, but higher flux superconductors would allow better, smaller, cheaper stellarators and tokamaks - opening the door for fusion power.
- steve76 8y agoBuckyballs have mass, yet exhibit wave interference. We can make them bigger and bigger, and focus them as if they classically popped into existence. I wonder if it holds up on very large scales, like if we can cover an atmosphere, or a star in one. What would that mean? Elements now are just variations of carbon structures? And could we at that level build a virtual one? Develop some exotic particle in the atmosphere, get really precise at moving it around, and model the entire Earth, Solar System or Galaxy as interactions as fullerenes? Just thinking.
- steve76 8y agoAnother thought is medical applications. Imagine if we get good enough to shoot a beam of them like a chest x-ray or a mri. The wave collapses everywhere except inside artery blockages or tumors, and you have non-invasive treatments and therapeutic imaging.
- EugeneOZ 8y agoSuperconductors = flying cars. Finally they are working on something useful!
- Haga 8y ago
- gigatexal 8y agoYes. There’s not applicable commercially viable things based on graphene yet. But superconductivity will be a revolution in many ways and especially in computing.
- mailslot 8y agoSuperconductivity would revolutionize transportation, low cost medical imaging with MRIs, and weapons. Lots of weapons.
- scotradamus 8y agoYou're forgetting the two most important; energy storage and transport.
- m12k 8y agoYeah, imagine if we could more or less losslessly transfer electricity over vast distances. Massive renewable energy farms could be built wherever there was sun/wind/rivers whether the energy consumers are close or not. Energy could be sent to pump water into reservoirs as huge centralized batteries. The problem with 'what happens when the sun isn't shining/the wind isn't blowing' could be sidestepped because it's always sunny/windy somewhere, so we just get the power from as far away as needed.
- fsh 8y agoPeople seem to underestimate how efficient regular power lines are. The continent-spanning european power grid has a total transmission loss of about 6% using 19th century technology (transformers and copper wires). Modern high voltage DC lines can perform even better. The main limitation seems to be that people don't want to have power lines in their back yard. Not something that superconductors are going to sove.
- kingkongjaffa 8y agoAlso the cost of a equivalent superconductor network would be an order of magnitude more expensive that what is essentially room temperature metal cables with very basic technology - transformers, insulation, and switchgear.
- rubyn00bie 8y agoSo... I’m an idiot but I have a question: could this theoretically allow for a battery that never loses a charge and/or charges instantly? FWIW— I literally know almost nothing about superconductors...
- soulofmischief 8y agoNo, because that would violate the Law of Conservation of Energy, which according to our current understanding would imply that this form of "perpetual motion" is impossible as long as the system experiences some sort of load. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
- rubyn00bie 8y agoI don’t think I’m talking about perpetual motion at all... When I say never loses a charge I don’t mean it’s limitless capacity. I mean it could be charged 1,000,000 times without any affect on the capacity of the system? Maybe a better way to say it, a battery that does not degrade with each use. Superconductors allow for the perfect transfer of electrons without any loss? So like if I had a giant earth sized graphene wire superconductor for this example: could I have the energy travel around the ring indefinitely so long as it’s closed?
- Arbalest 8y agoThe second law of thermodynamics basically stipulates this is impossible. All materials wear out no matter what, even black holes eventually turn to entropy. You could create one with much better resistance to wear, but never completely resistant. Also I doubt true superconductors exist, it may be their losses exist below measurement error, but the fact that electrons are in relative motion, and are subject to the effects of the world around it, they must lose energy at some point. Edit 1: Second, not first law Edit 2: In your second paragraph, you literally described a perpetual motion machine, electrons going around a circuit is still 'motion'
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- mystikal83 8y agoVittoria, a tire company have used Graphene tech of sorts in their bicycle tires: https://www.vittoria.com/us/graphene-technology https://www.vittoria.com/us/graphene-technology
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- sara1732 8y agoSometimes our feet smell are so bad even we feel ashamed due to our feet smell Now you can get rid from this just follow this simple method https://zoomtips.blogspot.com/2019/04/Smelly-feet.html https://zoomtips.blogspot.com/2019/04/Smelly-feet.html Guy made world record He drive car on two wheels See his video how he is driving http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX See the video of this man he is catching balls and he is wearing blindfold http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl
- alanz1223 8y agoHoly guac, room temperature superconductivity seems almost science fiction-y but just imagine the disruption it would make. I would be particularly excited to experience how much electric motors and energy transfer/storage and conversion would improve.
- pault 8y agoAnd death rays. Don't forget about the death rays!
- fsh 8y agoApparently they reached superconductivity at 3K. Hardly room temperature.
- TomMarius 8y agoHowever this method is completely different and thus might open more options
- dredmorbius 8y agoVs. cryogenic superconductors is a radically different phenomenon.
- zamalek 8y agoThe thing is they can use it to understand superconductivity because there are vastly fewer variables involved. It could lead to room-temperature superconductivity, assuming it even exists.
- intenex 8y agoFairly shocking to me that Yuan Cao received literally a single glancing mention here, but he was clearly the one who actually made the pivotal discovery, and is the first author on the Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26154 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26154), and was the one named to the Nature 10 in 2018 for his discovery. Really mind boggling that this entire piece focuses all the attention on his supervisor and almost neglects to mention him at all.
- PakG1 8y agoCynical me asks isn't that how it works for PhD students?
- fs2 8y agoYes, probably.
- georgeburdell 8y agoPretty typical of academia. Grad students also don't normally get Nobels
- YorkshireSeason 8y agoAnd for good reason. A responsible supervisor will typically give PhD students tasks that he has already "kind-of / sort-of" worked out as feasible. I once read the following recommendation for how to set dissertation subjects, I can't recall by whom. - BSc thesis: what I can do over lunch - Master thesis: what I could do in an afternoon - PhD thesis: what I could do in a week (Here the figures don't mean typing, programming etc, but the core intellectual work). After having supervised nearly 200 theses are BSc, Masters and PhD level, I must agree, this is a pretty great heuristic. Note: there are exceptions. Some PhD theses go way beyond this, but those are rare. I have no idea about Yuan Cao's work, discussed here.
- kingkongjaffa 8y agoWhere are you in the world that the level of sophistication of the work being set is such that this heuristic holds true? I suppose a BSc thesis or design report etc. is supposed to be more of an exercise in demonstrating some understanding and creating something, but beyond that I would expect some fairly novel impact from an MSc and definitely from a PhD. I'm very surprised by this as the quality of MSc theses and PhD theses at the universities I attended were all fairly novel, and even if the supervisor had suspected the same conclusion, the amount of work to arrive at that conclusion is non-trivial when doing research. I fear this devalues the contribution of what these young researchers are doing. I know many people who went on to very good research positions and even founded companies based on their Masters or PhD work.
- sgt101 8y agoNo mention of ballistic conductivity in CNTs which is well known, this is obviously very different?
- PunksATawnyFill 8y agoYAAWWWWN. Graphene was going to transform everything. Years ago.
- plutonorm 8y agoWhere'd all the intelligent comments go? Hackernews used to be a cut above when it came to an intelligent comments section. Where'd all those people go, is there a new place to hang out?
- homarp 8y agoIf you know th new place, you know the first rule of the new place... A nice intro to superconductors http://www.superconductors.org/uses.htm http://www.superconductors.org/uses.htm the history of graphene, the "next best thing" since forever: https://graphene-flagship.eu/material/Pages/The-history-of-graphene.aspx https://graphene-flagship.eu/material/Pages/The-history-of-g... (previous HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751946 )
- dmos62 8y agoCareful, we shoot the messenger these days.
- sagitariusrex 8y ago>Even without superconductivity, ordinary computers and other electronics could get a huge boost in performance versus cost from twistronics, due to the fact that entire complex electronic circuits could in theory be built into a few sheets of pure carbon, without needing a dozen or more complexly etched layers of challenging materials common to today’s chips.
- harryking 8y agoIts quite shocking to see that the hard bonded carbon sheets can also move in spite of their large forces of attraction betweeb them . Well its other effects would be overwhelming ..
- ezequiel-garzon 8y agoDoes anybody know if the environmental impact of graphene is supposed to be any better than that of plastic? Does it break down more easily as it is so thin? I’m worried we may outdo ourselves with the magic compound of the century...
- ekingr 8y agoAnother major 'environmental' impact that may be very nefarious is the health effect of such nano-materials. We don't want to re-create all the mess that we have today form asbestos -- which was also a wonder-material at the time.
- village-idiot 8y agoThe problem with asbestos wasn’t really the toxicity per se, it’s that the companies using it hid the toxicity to avoid having to do all the expensive safety steps that would let them use asbestos without killing people. We can avoid this with carbon nanotubes and similar if we’re honest about the risks and careful with how we handle them.
- hanniabu 8y agoThis will probably happen again given all the money that's on the line.
- village-idiot 8y agoThe fact that we’re talking about it here implies that we’re in a better place than we were a century ago.
- dasil003 8y agoA century ago yes, fifty years ago I'm not so sure, thirty years ago almost certainly not.
- agumonkey 8y ago
- rezeroed 8y agoIs this a bigger thing than borophene which was a big thing a few weeks ago?
- phkahler 8y agoI'm gonna say "no". This is only relevant in that it might lead to better understanding of superconductivity. When the models can predict this, they will have made progress.
- golergka 8y ago> Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is channeling some of his copious energy into a morning run, dodging startled pedestrians as he zips along, gradually disappearing into the distance. Can someone please write up TL;DR about the actual science without the details on what kind of coffee did the author sip while taking the interview?
- logfromblammo 8y agoWhen two sheets of graphene are stacked, and twisted with respect to one another, they form a metameterial, with properties partially dependent on the twist angle. At a twist angle of 1.1 degrees, the energy required for an electron in one sheet to tunnel to the other sheet drops to zero. The problem is that certain angles represent a lower-energy state than others, so twisting to a magic angle also requires overcoming some buckling and creasing in the individual sheets, that allow regions to locally align to a non-magic angle (like zero degrees). This confounds measurements of the properties of the metamaterial. Certain angles have been shown to exhibit superconductivity. While less useful than previously discovered superconductors for the purpose of moving electrons, these are more useful for studying superconductivity itself, because the superconductor is 2.5d, composed of a single type of atom, each with identical bond configurations. A lot of the variables that appear in other superconductors drop out.
- golergka 8y agoYou're a much better popular science writer than the author of the original article. Thank you.
- Roark66 8y agoIt is a really cool discovery, but it is still not room temperature superconductivity...