Physicists at UCLA set out to design a better transistor and ended up discovering a new way to think about the structure of space.
The UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute recently did research revealing that separating gaps into discrete sites like a chessboard, could show pointed electrons. The electrons, with no finite radius, lug their inherent angular momentum, or ‘spin’.
Professor Chris Regan and student Matthew Mecklenburg were analyzing graphene when they discovered that a particle is able to gain spin by existing in a spot with two kinds of positions, dark and light tiles. The particle appears to spin if the tiles are packed so close together that it is not possible to discern their line of separation. Regan states that the electron may spin when the gaps at such tiny intervals is rough, and broken up resembling a chess board. The research paper has been published in the March 18 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Spin up and down, in quantum mechanics, indicates the two states of an electron. An electron's spin has only two values that show why matter is stable and the nature of the chemical. The team designed the quantum mechanical prototype while trying to solve the issue of how to figure out how graphene could be used to make better transistors. The UCLA team is endeavoring to design fast transistors with graphene. The graphene electrons jump between carbon molecules. The graphene tiles are shaped like triangles. The dark tiles point up while the light ones point down. When it absorbs a photon, it hops from light to dark tiles. The grapheme electrons can be restricted to particular discrete spots in space to create spin, which comes from the pattern of the tiles.
Source: http://www.ucla.edu/