A team of physicists working at the University of California recently registered success in the development of two-dimensional quantum materials that have new kind of magnetic and electrical features. The team worked in coordination with their colleagues from Furan University, University of Maryland, Princeton University, and UC Berkeley. What makes these unique is the fact that these materials do not use electrons as their signal carriers, the usual two-dimensional semiconductors do make use of electrons for this purpose.  

 

The Dirac and Majorana fermions are those particles that have zero mass and move with the speed of light. The researchers also claim that these newly developed materials can easily become building blocks for future quantum computing based computers as well as other kinds of advanced electronics. They accomplished this task with the help of a fiber-optic Sagnac interferometer microscope. The team also observed a magnetism in the microscopic flake of CGT (i.e. Chromium Germanium Telluride) that was created by them. The compound was seen at a temperature of -197 degrees centigrade and it is being considered as the cousin of graphene. 

 

 

An associate professor of UCI, Jing Xia, adds, “Imagine you turn back the clock and a cup of red tea turns green. Wouldn’t that make this tea very exotic? This is indeed exotic for superconductors. And it’s the first time it’s been observed in 2D materials.  The issue now is to try to achieve this at normal temperatures.”