“It’s a bit like driving past a vineyard and looking out the window at the vineyard rows. Every now and then, you see no rows because you’re looking directly along a row,” said Nathaniel Gabor, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside. “This is akin to what happens when two atomic layers are stacked on top of each other. At certain angles of twist, everything is energetically allowed. It adds up just right to allow for interesting possibilities of energy transfer.”
This is the future of new materials being synthesized by twisting and stacking atomically thin layers, and is still in the “alchemy” stage, Gabor added. To bring it all under one roof, he and physicist Justin C. W. Song of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have proposed this field of research be called “electron quantum metamaterials” and have just published a perspective article in Nature Nanotechnology.
“We highlight the potential of engineering synthetic periodic arrays with feature sizes below the wavelength of an electron. Such engineering allows the electrons to be manipulated in unusual ways, resulting in a new range of synthetic quantum metamaterials with unconventional responses,” Gabor said.
Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties that do not occur naturally. Examples include optical cloaking devices and super-lenses akin to the Fresnel lens that lighthouses use. Nature, too, has adopted such techniques – for example, in the unique coloring of butterfly wings – to manipulate photons as they move through nanoscale structures.
“Unlike photons that scarcely interact with each other, however, electrons in subwavelength structured metamaterials are charged, and they strongly interact,” Gabor said. “The result is an enormous variety of emergent phenomena and radically new classes of interacting quantum metamaterials.”
Gabor and Song were invited by Nature Nanotechnology to write a review paper. But the pair chose to delve deeper and lay out the fundamental physics that may explain much of the research in electron quantum metamaterials. They wrote a perspective paper instead that envisions the current status of the field and discusses its future.

Image Credit: CIFAR
News This Week
Polaritons open up a new lane on the semiconductor highway
On the highway of heat transfer, thermal energy is moved by way of quantum particles called phonons. But at the nanoscale of today's most cutting-edge semiconductors, those phonons don't remove enough heat. That's why [...]
EU seeks agreement on world’s first AI law
The European Union will seek to thrash out an agreement on sweeping rules to regulate artificial intelligence on Wednesday, following months of difficult negotiations in particular on how to monitor generative AI applications like [...]
Lightning sparks scientists’ design of ultraviolet-C device for food sanitization
Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a portable, self-powered ultraviolet-C device called the Tribo-sanitizer that can inactivate two of the bacteria responsible for many foodborne illnesses and deaths. The Tribo-sanitizer's UVC [...]
3D Eye Scans Emerge as a Crucial Tool in Combating Kidney Disease
A new study indicates that 3D retinal scans could revolutionize the early detection and monitoring of kidney disease, offering a non-invasive and efficient diagnostic tool. 3D eye scans can reveal vital clues about kidney [...]
Researchers develop a blood test to identify individuals at risk of developing Parkinson’s disease
Research carried out at Oxford's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences has led to the development of a new blood-based test to identify the pathology that triggers Parkinson's disease before the main symptoms occur. This [...]
“Challenging the Paradigm” – Scientists Develop New Approach To Stop Cancer Growth
Biochemists at Case Western Reserve are concentrating on the degradation of a key protein that drives cancer; represents a major shift in research. Biochemical researchers at Case Western Reserve University have discovered a a new function [...]
Researcher develops a chatbot with an expertise in nanomaterials
A researcher has just finished writing a scientific paper. She knows her work could benefit from another perspective. Did she overlook something? Or perhaps there's an application of her research she hadn't thought of. [...]
Research shows human behavior guided by fast changes in dopamine levels
What happens in the human brain when we learn from positive and negative experiences? To help answer that question and better understand decision-making and human behavior, scientists are studying dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter [...]
Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue
The ‘anthrobots’ were able to repair a scratch in a layer of neurons in the lab. Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells that are able to repair damaged neural tissue1. The [...]
Antimicrobial Resistance – A Global Concern
Key facts Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top global public health and development threats. It is estimated that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to [...]
Advancing Pancreatic Cancer Treatment with Nanoparticle-Based Chemotherapy
Pancreatic cancer, a particularly lethal form of cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the western world, often remains undiagnosed until its advanced stages due to a lack of early symptoms. [...]
The ‘jigglings and wigglings of atoms’ reveal key aspects of COVID-19 virulence evolution
Richard Feynman famously stated, "Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms." This week, Nature Nanotechnology features a study that sheds new light on the evolution of the coronavirus [...]
AI system self-organizes to develop features of brains of complex organisms
Cambridge scientists have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system—in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints—allows it to develop features [...]
How Blind People Recognize Faces via Sound
Summary: A new study reveals that people who are blind can recognize faces using auditory patterns processed by the fusiform face area, a brain region crucial for face processing in sighted individuals. The study employed [...]
Treating tumors with engineered dendritic cells
Cancer biologists at EPFL, UNIGE, and the German Cancer Research Center (Heidelberg) have developed a novel immunotherapy that does not require knowledge of a tumor's antigenic makeup. The new results may pave the way [...]
Networking nano-biosensors for wireless communication in the blood
Biological computing machines, such as micro and nano-implants that can collect important information inside the human body, are transforming medicine. Yet, networking them for communication has proven challenging. Now, a global team, including EPFL [...]
Leave A Comment