50%

 

50% may be our half of a pair of interactive worlds if researcher theories prove to be correct. In this instance, investigating properties of graphene may explain how reality works.

Physicists sometimes come up with bizarre stories that sound like science fiction. Yet some turn out to be true, like how the curvature of space and time described by Einstein was eventually confirmed by astronomical measurements. Others linger on as mere possibilities or mathematical curiosities.

In a new paper in Physical Review Research, Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) Fellow Victor Galitski and JQI graduate student Alireza Parhizkar investigated the imaginative possibility that our reality is only one half of a pair of interacting worlds. Their mathematical model may offer a fresh perspective for looking at fundamental aspects of reality—including why our universe expands the way it does and how that relates to the most minuscule lengths allowed in quantum mechanics. These topics are critical to understanding our universe and are part of one of the great mysteries of modern physics.

A curved and stretched sheet of graphene laying over another curved sheet creates a new pattern that impacts how electricity moves through the sheets. A new model suggests that similar physics might emerge if two adjacent universes are able to interact. Credit: Alireza Parhizkar, JQI

The pair of scientists stumbled upon this new perspective when they were looking into something quite different, research on sheets of graphene—single atomic layers of carbon in a repeating hexagonal pattern. They realized that experiments on the electrical properties of stacked sheets of graphene produced results that resembled little universes and that the underlying phenomenon might generalize to other areas of physics. In stacks of graphene, new electrical behaviors arise from interactions between the individual sheets, so maybe unique physics could similarly emerge from interacting layers elsewhere—perhaps in cosmological theories about the entire universe.

It's all about the magic angle and the moire patterns it produces.

Overlapping two sheets of graphene shows a characteristic pattern.Credit: Juliette Halsey for Nature

The throngs of physicists had come to hear how Jarillo-Herrero’s team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge had unearthed exotic behaviour in single-atom-thick layers of carbon, known as graphene. Researchers already knew that this wonder material can conduct electricity at ultra-high speed. But the MIT team had taken a giant leap by turning graphene into a superconductor: a material that allows electricity to flow without resistance. They achieved that feat by placing one sheet of graphene over another, rotating the other sheet to a special orientation, or ‘magic angle’, and cooling the ensemble to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. That twist radically changed the bilayer’s properties — turning it first into an insulator and then, with the application of a stronger electric field, into a superconductor.

Research, like conversation, is fractal. :)