"Designer Electrons" Can Be Custom-Made for Future Devices
Molecular Graphene Hari Manoharan / Stanford UniversityElectrons were fooled into behaving as though they were in a magnetic field, with no magnets around Researchers at Stanford and the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Lab have created a new kind of graphene that promises the first-ever "designer electrons" that can be custom tuned to exhibit exotic properties. This "molecular graphene" could lead to whole new types of materials with new electrical properties, which in turn could spawn whole new kinds of devices. The way electrons conduct their business is central to just about everything we consider modern electronic technology. For the most part, those properties are fairly well-defined, and we manipulate those properties to create everything from better batteries to larger memory storage devices to faster computer chips. The advent of graphene has opened the door to whole new kinds of materials with strange new electronic properties, a niche of materials science whose...