A team of scientists has reported the discovery of new and unusual behavior in a unique type of layered graphene, which they say reveals a previously unknown category of material behavior — called “transdimensional.”
Scientists from Nanjing University, ShanghaiTech University and Southern University of Science and Technology in China have created a completely new category of materials that operates in a intermediate territory between the two-dimensional flat world and conventional three-dimensional space.
The discovery involves , a peculiarity of physics in which electricity can deflect sideways in a material due to its internal magnetic properties.
Typically, this unusual phenomenon behaves relatively predictableat least with regard to expectations based on factors such as the effectively two- or three-dimensional nature of the material.
However, in a recent study, researchers discovered a new version of this effect that appears only in graphene layers with a specific thickness of few nanometers.
At these scales, the researchers behind the discovery found that the material behaves in what they compare to a kind of “intermediate” statewhich is not neither fully two-dimensional nor three-dimensional — therefore, effectively “transdimensional“.
According to the researchers, this peculiar behavior allows electrons to move in a coordinated way both within and between layers, resulting in considerably more complex magnetic and electrical behavior than had ever been documented.
The results of the study were presented in a published at the end of April in the journal Nature.
“Here we report the experimental observation of a fundamentally new type of anomalous Hall Effect, which couples in-plane and out-of-plane orbital magnetizations in multilayer rhombohedral graphene“, writes the team in their article.
The effect, according to the researchers, is evidenced by what they characterize as “a pronounced hysteresis of the Hall resistance under both in-plane and out-of-plane magnetic fields.”
In essence, the observed state appears to result from unusual metallic phases that the team claims to have detected, which spontaneously break symmetry of time reversal and also appear to deviate from the symmetries that normally result from interactions between electrons, explains .
“By measuring multiple devices spanning 3 to 15 layers, we discovered that this phenomenon emerges only at an intermediate thickness of 2 to 5 nm“, says the team.
The recently observed “transdimensional” state suggests something new that some physicists have long suspected: the possible existence of previously unknown categories of material behavior.
Building on the discovery of what researchers now call the “transdimensional” anomalous Hall effect, the results could potentially pave the way for new applications in the domain of studying exotic quantum effectss, which could contribute to advances in electronic or quantum technologies.
