MONTREAL, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Canadian physicists say they have discovered a previously unknown state of matter that could have a "momentous" impact on creation of new electronic devices.
McGill University researchers say the new state of matter, a quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal, is a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors.
Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth.
The resulting startling transformation of the two-dimensional electron system inside the semiconducting material into a quasi-three-dimensional system was something existing theory did not predict, the scientists said.
"It's actually not quite 3-D, it's an in-between state, a totally new phenomenon," said Guillaume Gervais, director of McGill's Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. "This is the kind of thing the theoreticians love. Now they're scratching their heads and trying to fine-tune their models."
The researchers' findings appear in the journal Nature Physics.
