New method provides answers to long lasting dispute about electrical insulators
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - 11:32
in Physics & Chemistry
Experts have been heavily discussing why exactly electrically insulating materials insulate as they do. Based on different mechanisms, a classification scheme for insulators has been in use since the 1960s – a theoretical one. However, it has been yet impossible to distinctly classify all insulators due to a lack of suitable experimental approaches. A team of physicists from Kiel University (Germany) and the University of Colorado in Boulder has now developed a new method to distinguish different insulators unambiguously. The study was published in the online journal Nature Communications.