Room-Temperature Electron-Hole Liquid

in #science5 years ago

Making a good drink is often not easy. And the same often goes for physics where scientists like to create highly unusual liquids.

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And recently a scientific team from the University of California in Riverside recently succeeded in being the first to make an electron-hole liquid at room temperature. Their success opens the road towards making the practical and effective devices capable of generating and detecting terahertz wavelengths.

Terahertz devices could find usage in many different fields from communications in space, through medicine where it could detect tumors, up to detecting contraband for security purposes. On top of that, their research will also have its use for other scientists, for example, during the research of the properties of matter at incredibly small scales or during the development of quantum materials.

What the scientists did is that they created an ultra-thin “sandwich” from two layers of graphene and put in a layer of molybdenum ditelluride. The final results was only slightly more thicker than a single molecule of DNA. When they had it, they started to fire ultra-fast laser pulses every quadrillionth of a second.

If you do something like that with a normal semi-conductor like for example silicone, the lasers pulses will release a cloud of electrons and electron-holes that behaves like a gas. But during the scientist’s experiment, the electron condensed into a drop of liquid. The scientists themselves were surprised that it happened at room temperature as so far we have only been capable to achieve that at temperatures close to absolute zero.

The electron liquid has interesting electronic properties allowing them to become the base for the development of new opto-electronic devices that would work in the terahertz part of the spectrum.

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