When stacked like lasagna noodles, the thinnest material on the planet changes what it can do — and what those trying to make devices out of it might do with it.
GRAPHENE STEP Three layers of graphene stacked like a sandwich with the top and bottom layers aligned (left) behave like a metal. But when the layers step like stairs (right), quantum weirdness ensues. Lau Lab/UC Riverside
Electrons act funny in three sheets of atom-thick carbon, or graphene, arranged just so. The particles’ masses seem to change in an unusual way that depends on the electrons’ speed.
“The slower these particles move, the heavier they become,” says Igor Zaliznyak, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., whose team reports this property online September 25 in Nature Physics.
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