Physicists find a new way to push electrons around
When moving through a conductive material in an electric field, electrons tend to follow the path of least resistance — which runs in the direction of that field. But now physicists at MIT and the University of Manchester have found an unexpectedly different behavior under very specialized conditions — one that might lead to new types of transistors and electronic circuits that could prove highly energy-efficient. They’ve found that when a sheet of graphene — a two-dimensional array of pure carbon — is placed atop another two-dimensional material, electrons instead move sideways, perpendicular to the electric field. This happens even without the influence of a magnetic field — the only other known way of inducing such a sideways flow. What’s more, two separate streams of electrons would flow in opposite directions, both crosswise to the field, canceling out each other’s electrical charge to produce a “neutral, chargeless current,” explains Leonid Levitov, an MIT...
