What’s the Magic Behind Graphene’s ‘Magic’ Angle?
29th May 2019
The blockbuster discovery last year of superconductivity in a material called twisted bilayer graphene caught theorists off guard. In all their published ruminations, none of them had even speculated about the phenomenon that showed up in Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: a sudden loss of electrical resistance when two sheets of graphene — honeycomb lattices of carbon atoms — were stacked and twisted at a relative angle of 1.1 degrees. But theorists are making up for that lapse now, publishing a steady stream of explanations for this “magic angle.”