Creating 'Designer Electrons'

Researchers from Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the first-ever system of 'designer electrons' - exotic variants of ordinary electrons with tunable properties that may ultimately lead to new types of materials and devices. The handcrafted, honeycomb-shaped structures were inspired by graphene, a pure form of carbon widely heralded for its potential in future electronics.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] Stanford University so I'm going to move this molecule right here as I move it you're going to hear the squeak which represents the bonds [Music] breaking and voila it's at a new position we're building a material atom by atom molecule by

00:00:25 molecule we specifically have reproduced the electronic properties of graphine by patterning the surface of a copper Crystal the instrument that we use to assemble this is called a scanning tunneling microscope it's sitting behind me in a soundproof chamber to move atoms you need a microscope that's the size of a car at the atomic level we're bringing a tip that ends in a single atom it's

00:00:46 grabbing a Target carbon monoxide molecule and then dragging it across the surface this is a process we repeat one molecule at a time to build up a new material here's the heart of the microscope a metal tip which we use to move across the metal surface even though graphine can be found in nature very easily it's just you know the tip of your pencil the interesting thing

00:01:07 about our experiment is that we have a laev of control that you don't have in real materials here we show that just by stretching the graphine distorting it that the electrons will behave like they're in a huge magnetic field it's as if we're turning a knob and we're going from zero Tesla no field all the way up to 60 Tesla I think this is just a start graphing is really simple structure from

00:01:28 here we can move on to the more and more complex structure we're always interested in seeing is there something new that the basic ingredients can do that we've somehow missed because nature didn't give us the material in the right combination to see this stuff and what we're discovering is yes for more please visit us at stanford.edu