Rice University atomic physicists have verified a key prediction from a 55-year-old theory about one-dimensional electronics that is increasingly relevant thanks to Silicon Valley’s inexorable quest for miniaturization.
“Chipmakers have been shrinking feature sizes on microchips for decades, and device physicists are now exploring the use of nanowires and nanotubes where the channels that electrons pass through are almost one-dimensional,” said Rice experimental physicist Randy Hulet. “That’s important because 1D is a different ballgame in terms of electron conductance. You need a new model, a new way of representing reality, to make sense of it.”
With IBM and others committed to incorporating one-dimensional carbon nanotubes into integrated circuits, chip designs will increasingly need to account for 1D effects that arise from electrons being fermions, antisocial particles that are unwilling to share space.