Every time a new discovery about graphene is announced, I think, "Holy crap.

As soon as you hear the word graphene, it is quite natural to ask yourself what this extraordinary material can do. For those of you who don't know, graphene is essentially a lattice-like sheet of atomically thin carbon with what can only be described as magical properties. Scientists have been working with graphene for some time now, using it to seduce us with promises of extremely fast and powerful batteries, solar panels that absorb sunlight (opens in new tab), and even 100TB HDDs in the next decade (opens in new tab)

This is a very good thing.

This is because graphene is a material with tremendous conductivity and capability. Graphene has caused a bit of a revolution in high-tech, but it has a long way to go before it will be adopted in mainstream devices. As more and more tests are conducted, it seems that scientists continue to discover the amazing potential of graphene, and this new discovery by researchers at MIT (open in new tab) may once again change our perception of this material. It could be the key to creating a brain-like computer, like the one Intel is working on, Leuch 2 (opens in new tab).

After all, graphene is not only an excellent conductor, it can also be persuaded to become ferromagnetic. In other words, graphene can remain magnetic even in the absence of a magnetic field. This alone is impressive, but furthermore, it has been discovered that magnetism can be turned on and off.

For atomically thin materials such as graphene, or crystals grown on silicon, for example, the way they are arranged and stacked can have a significant impact on the final result. Therefore, certain methods of stacking graphene are now known as magic angles. Such work with small angles at the atomic level is also known as twisted electronics or twistronics. For this discovery, the researchers were working with two hexagonal graphene layers lined up between two boron nitride slices in order to increase the magnetic force of graphene.

. While working on the alignment, the researchers discovered a new way to stack the material that has a very unique effect. Instead of simply increasing the magnetic field, they discovered that they could turn the superconductivity of graphene on and off with electrical pulses. This occurred when the top layer of boron nitride and two slices of graphene were aligned and the bottom layer of boron nitride was at an angle. The overall appearance is that of a horizontal sandwich. I'd like to feed it to Pokemon Violet's Myrideon. [says Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 'This is the first time we've had a superconducting material that can suddenly turn on and off electrically. This could pave the way for a new generation of twisted graphene-based superconducting electronics."

The team has also found a new superconductor that can be used in a wide range of applications.

Perhaps the best part of this is that the researchers do not fully understand where this ability to turn on and off comes from. Researchers are certain that the twisted alignment has something to do with boron nitride. Nevertheless, the ability to turn graphene into a persistent superconductor is a very big deal, apart from the ability to switch states on a whim.

"People are trying to make electronic devices that do calculations in a way inspired by the brain," says Jarillo-Herrero. The brain has neurons that fire when a certain threshold is exceeded." Similarly, magic-angle graphene has found a way to rapidly switch superconductivity when a certain threshold is exceeded. This is an important property for neuromorphic computing." [Of course, MIT is not alone in looking to the future of brain computing. Dr. Mark Dean, best known for breaking the 1 GHz clock speed, is working on neuromorphic computing (opens in new tab). They are silicon-based and designed to mimic synaptic firing. Now that companies like Samsung are trying to stick the human brain into SSDs (opens in new tab), graphene may be the answer to these questions.