Electrons corralled using new quantum tool
Researchers have succeeded in creating a new “whispering gallery” effect for electrons in a sheet of graphene — making it possible to precisely control a region that reflects electrons within the material. They say the accomplishment could provide a basic building block for new kinds of electronic lenses, as well as quantum-based devices that combine electronics and optics. The new system uses a needle-like probe that forms the basis of present-day scanning tunneling microscopes (STM), enabling control of both the location and the size of the reflecting region within graphene — a two-dimensional form of carbon that is just one atom thick. The new finding is described in a paper appearing in the journal Science, co-authored by MIT professor of physics Leonid Levitov and researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Maryland, Imperial College London, and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan. When the...