New Technique Lets Scientists Create Resistance-Free Electron Channels

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state – an exotic quantum phenomenon that could help researchers advance quantum computing and energy-efficient electronics. To prepare chiral interface states, the researchers worked at the Molecular Foundry, a user facility at Berkeley Lab, to fabricate a device called twisted monolayer-bilayer graphene, which is a stack of two atomically thin layers of graphene rotated precisely relative to one another.