For several decades, a central puzzle in quantum physics has remained unsolved: Could electrons behave like a perfect, frictionless fluid with electrical properties described by a universal quantum number?
This unique property of electrons has been extremely difficult to detect in any material so far because of the presence of atomic defects, impurities, and imperfections in the material.
Researchers at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), along with collaborators from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, have now finally detected this quantum fluid of electrons in graphene—a material consisting of a single sheet of pure carbon atoms.
The results, published in Nature Physics, open a new window into the quantum realm and establish graphene as a unique tabletop laboratory for exploring hitherto unseen quantum phenomena.
"It is amazing that there is so much to do on just a single layer of graphene even after 20 years of discovery," says Arindam Ghosh, Professor at the Department of Physics, IISc, and one of the corresponding authors of the study.
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