Spintronics

Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have previously found that graphene can have exotic properties when situated at a 'magic angle'. Now, a new study by some of the members of the same team shows that this material could also be a "spin-triplet" superconductor – one that isn't affected by high magnetic fields – which potentially makes it even more useful.

"The value of this experiment is what it teaches us about fundamental superconductivity, about how materials can behave, so that with those lessons learned, we can try to design principles for other materials which would be easier to manufacture, that could perhaps give you better superconductivity," says physicist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Researchers from France, South Korea, and Japan have created a graphene-based “beam splitter” for electronic currents. The tunable device’s operation is directly comparable to that of an optical interferometer. The team believes that the technology could enable electron interferometry to be used in nanotechnology and quantum computing.
Quantum Hall valley splitter - schematic representation of the p − n junction. Image from article

An optical interferometer splits a beam of light in two, sending each beam along a different path before recombining the beams at a detector. The measured interference of the beams at the detector can be used to detect tiny differences in the lengths of the two paths. Recently, physicists have become interested in doing a similar thing with currents of electrons in solid-state devices, taking advantage of the fact that electrons behave similarly to waves in the quantum world.