Physicists create five-lane superhighway for electrons

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Dallas, and  the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have created a “five-lane superhighway” for electrons in a material called rhombohedral graphene, which is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order. In October 2023, the scientists had shown that rhombohedral graphene could allow the unimpeded movement of electrons around the edge of the material but not through the middle. That resulted in a superhighway and required the application of a large magnetic field some tens of thousands times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In the current work, the team reports creating a five-lane superhighway without any magnetic field.