At least, this is what the results of the research published in the pages suggest nature. The paper’s authors describe how they were able to set a new record for recording levels of magnetoresistance without having to lower the temperature toward absolute zero. This value means exactly -273.15 degrees Celsius and cannot be achieved in terrestrial laboratories, although it does occur in space.
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Behind this remarkable result are scientists from the Universities of Lancaster and Manchester. As one of the members of the research team, Alexey Berdyugin, explains, over the past 10 years, the electronic quality of graphene devices has improved dramatically, although people seemed to focus on searching for new phenomena at very low temperatures, ignoring ambient conditions.
Because of this, Berdyugin and the rest of his comrades decided to raise the temperature a bit, and got surprisingly positive results. They used a pure, unmodified form of graphene, such that the superconductivity can only change as a result of temperature differences. When more heat is applied, this causes the charged particles in the material to get excited and holes of some kind to appear.
Graphene is considered a potential material of the future, although the results of the new experiment do not necessarily provide practical applications
Later, the researchers used magnets to see how the heated graphene interacted with them. Its response to magnetoresistance was shown to be greater than 100 percent, a record not previously seen in other materials.
Pure, high-quality graphene at room temperature provides the opportunity to explore a completely new configuration, which in principle could have been discovered even a decade ago, but was somehow ignored by everyone. We plan to study this exotic mineral system and surely more interesting results, phenomena and applications will emerge. explains Leonid Ponomarenko of Lancaster University
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Interestingly, during the observations, as the temperature increased, graphene began to exhibit properties not fully understood. And although it is difficult to list the specific applications resulting from the experiments carried out so far, there seems to be another problem that is more important: graphene is a material with great potential, which will certainly surprise us many times. Undoubtedly, we shouldn’t cross it off the list of candidates for future materials just yet.
