![]() Getting electrons to be still, however, allows them "to really talk to each other. And it takes a lot of fine-tuning to get them to stand still," says Paul. "That was the theoretically challenging part because it's not a very straightforward thing to ask of an electron. Specifically, the team predicts that a structure made of two layers of a 2D magnet topped by a layer of a 2D semiconductor material will generate a phenomenon called a flat band, in which the electrons in the semiconductor stand still. What might happen if the two fields-2D magnets and moiré materials-are combined? That is the focus of the current work. Separately, other scientists have advanced the field of 2D magnets. MIT Physics Professor Pablo Jarillo-Herrero pioneered the field with moiré graphene, which is composed of two sheets of atomically thin layers of graphene placed on top of each other and rotated at a slight angle. Those sandwich structures, in turn, are called moiré materials. "The whole world of two-dimensional materials is very interesting because you can stack them and twist them, and sort of play Legos with them to get all sorts of cool sandwich structures with unusual properties," says Paul, first author of the paper. The current work was guided by recent advances in 2D materials, or those consisting of only one or a few layers of atoms. His colleagues are Nisarga Paul, a physics graduate student, and Yang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate who is now a professor at the University of Tennessee. Fu is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. "This work started out as a theoretical speculation, and ended better than we could have hoped," says Liang Fu, a professor in MIT's Department of Physics and leader of the work. The team includes the conditions necessary to achieve that ultimate goal in a paper published in the February 24 issue of Science Advances. ![]() The work is theoretical, but the researchers are excited about collaborating with experimentalists to realize the predicted phenomena. ![]()
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