Nov 06 2018
Electron Quantum Metamaterials
Material science is, in my opinion, one of the most underappreciated of the sciences. Perhaps because it is so wonky, it doesn’t seem to get much public attention, and yet the development of new materials arguably has the potential to change our civilization more than any other single advance. Our level of technology is largely defined by the materials we have mastered, and discovering a new material is literally a technological game changer.
It’s always hard to predict the next big advance, but there are some intriguing candidates. Interest seems to be clustering around anything on the nano scale – such as carbon nanofibers. Two-dimensional materials that are only one or a few atoms thick (which includes carbon nanofibers) is an area of intense research as well. There is also a relatively new class of materials called metamaterials, which do interesting things with light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Metamaterials essentially have emergent properties, and could have potentially exotic applications such as rendering objects invisible in certain frequencies.
A new paper attempts to codify and name one particular type of metamaterial that the authors (Justin C. W. Song & Nathaniel M. Gabor) are proposing be called “electron quantum metamaterials.”
These types of materials are comprised of two or more layers of two-dimensional nanomaterial that are rotated with respect to each other so that special patterns emerge. This is likened to a moire pattern, where two sets of thin parallel lines are offset from each other by a certain amount and that creates an interference pattern. The interference patterns emerges from the specific relationship between the lines.