Physicists see electron whirlpools for the first time

Phys.org  July 6, 2022 To visualize electron vortices, an international team of researchers (Israel, USA – University of Colorado, MIT) synthesized pure single crystals of tungsten ditelluride, and exfoliated thin flakes of the material. Using e-beam lithography and plasma etching techniques they patterned each flake into a center channel connected to a circular chamber on either side. They etched the same pattern into thin flakes of gold with ordinary, classical electronic properties. They ran a current through each patterned sample at ultralow temperatures of 4.5 kelvins and measured the current flow at specific points throughout each sample, using SQUID on […]

Physicists image electrons flowing like water for the first time

Phys.org  December 10, 2019 While numerous techniques have been devised to image electron flows, the need remains for a nanoscale probe capable of simultaneously imaging current and voltage distributions with high sensitivity and minimal invasiveness, in a magnetic field, across a broad range of temperatures and beneath an insulating surface. An international team of researchers (Israel, UK, Japan, USA – Berkeley, Canada) produced a nanoscale detector built from a carbon nanotube transistor that can image the properties of flowing electrons with unprecedented sensitivity. They demonstrated the ability of their technique to visualize local aspects of intrinsically nonlocal transport, as in […]

Physicists create exotic electron liquid

Nanowerk  February 4, 2019 Researchers at UC Riverside constructed an ultrathin sandwich of the semiconductor molybdenum ditelluride between layers of graphene and bombarded the material with superfast laser pulses. They detected evidence of condensation into the equivalent of a liquid. As they turned up the amount of energy being dumped into the system, they saw the formation of an ‘anomalous photocurrent ring’ in the material. It grew like a droplet, rather than behaving like a gas. The research opens a pathway for development of practical and efficient devices to generate and detect light at terahertz wavelengths. Such devices could be […]