Physicists Excited by Discovery of New Form of Matter, Excitonium, page 2

a reply to: gortex

Still trying to wrap my head around new bosons paired up in transition phase TMD come this little gem!

"This milestone defines a new state-of-the-art in condensed matter science and nanofabrication," says Aron Pinczuk, professor of applied physics and physics at Columbia Engineering and senior author of the study. "While artificial graphene has been demonstrated in other systems such as optical, molecular, and photonic lattices, these platforms lack the versatility and potential offered by semiconductor processing technologies. Semiconductor artificial graphene devices could be platforms to explore new types of electronic switches, transistors with superior properties, and even, perhaps, new ways of storing information based on exotic quantum mechanical states."

The discovery of new low-dimensional materials, such as graphene and other ultrathin, layered van der Waals films that exhibit exciting new physical phenomena that were previously inaccessible, laid the groundwork for this study. "What was really critical to our work was the impressive advancements in nanofabrication," Pinczuk notes. "These offer us an ever-increasing toolbox for creating a myriad of high-quality patterns at nanoscale dimensions. This is an exciting time to be a physicist working in our field."

Phys.org, Dec. 12, 2017 - Engineers create artificial graphene in a nanofabricated semiconductor structure.

By using a production process we already have, silicon semiconductors, they created patterns on the surface just like how graphene aligns in a repeating pattern of hexagons. The electrons interact with each other in a quantum manner. The whole net result is the signature of regular, 2D graphene but on the surface of a semiconductor: artificial graphene!

I could not help myself and quoted the ending paragraph. When a physicist gets excited about Excitonium then a few days later artificial graphene shows up... makes one wonder what is going on!