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Graphene is stronger than steel and a better conductor that copper, making the two-dimensional material of particular interest to scientists.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
In a new paper, scientists found that when tuned to its Dirac point\u2014the moment when a material is neither a metal nor an insulator\u2014graphene flouts the Wiedemann\u2013Franz law, which states that the ratio of the thermal and electrical conductivity of a metal is proportional to temperature.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
This makes graphene a potentially low-cost platform for studying questions plaguing high-energy physics and astrophysics.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
First produced in 2004 by scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their efforts in 2010), graphene<\/a>\u2014a two-dimensional material made of carbon atoms\u2014has since been described as \u201cmagic<\/a>\u201d and a \u201cwonder material<\/a>\u201d for being both stronger than steel and a better conductor than copper. Two decades on, graphene is finally finding its way into a variety of industries, and will likely play a central role in future technologies.<\/p>\n Now, a new paper from scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, India, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan show that the wonders of graphene have never ceased. They discovered that when graphene\u2019s electron composition is tuned t0 its Dirac<\/a> point\u2014the moment when a material is neither a metal nor an insulator\u2014the subatomic structure behaves like a quantum fluid.<\/p>\n In fact, it even approached the properties of a \u201cperfect fluid<\/a>,\u201d which is when a material exhibits no viscosity. This is closely similar to a quark-gluon plasma<\/a>, the subatomic primordial soup of the universe that formed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang<\/a> (and also forms within the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN).<\/p>\n Perhaps even more surprising is that graphene appeared to flout a well-established rule of physics known as the Wiedemann\u2013Franz law, which states that the ratio of the thermal and electrical conductivity of a metal<\/a> is proportional to temperature. Instead, they found an inverse relationship that formed a 200-fold deviation from this law. In other words, thermal conductivity increased as electrical conductivity decreased (and vice versa). The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Physics<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is amazing that there is so much to do on just a single layer of graphene even after 20 years of discovery,\u201d Arindam Ghosh, one of the co-authors of the study from IISc, said in a press statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite its dramatic nature, this breakdown in the Wiedemann\u2013Franz law wasn\u2019t totally unexpected. A 2016 study published in the journal Science<\/a> noted that graphene exhibited this behavior at the Dirac point. This, however, study takes things a bit further, stating that this is the first time that the universally-applicable experimental evaluation of electric conductivity<\/a> was possible.<\/p>\n \u201cOur experiment addresses the missing piece in the potential of high-quality graphene as a testing bed for some of the unifying concepts in physics<\/a>,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n The researchers now see graphene as a potentially low-cost platform for exploring concepts in high-energy physics and astrophysics<\/a>, including black-hole thermodynamics and entanglement entropy scaling. Graphene could also become a particularly powerful quantum sensor, as it\u2019s capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.<\/p>\n