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MAGIC ANGLE. “Freedman highlights a stunning discovery made by the experimental physicist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: When a layer of graphene, a sheet of carbon crystal with atoms arranged in a hexagonal one-atom-thick lattice, is dropped on another one and rotated to just the correct angle of about 1.1 degrees, the graphene magically acquires the ability to become superconductive when the requisite number of electrons are added.” https://lnkd.in/enBM2vJn View in LinkedIn

QUANTUM MOIRÉ. “Recently, moiré effects have also entered the quantum realm in a big way, as David H. Freedman reported in his Quanta article “With a Simple Twist, a ‘Magic’ Material Is Now the Big Thing in Physics.” https://lnkd.in/enBM2vJn View in LinkedIn

MOIRÉ OPTICS. “When two very similar grids with light and dark elements overlap, new sinuous patterns emerge that seem to shimmer and flow.” https://lnkd.in/enBM2vJn View in LinkedIn

MOIRÉ PRIMER. “When Magic Is Seen in Twisted Graphene, That’s a Moiré.” https://lnkd.in/enBM2vJn View in LinkedIn

MOIRÉ. This has always fascinated me. When you walk by curving vertical railings they pattern strangely. Watered silks show a water ripple effect. Umbrellas in street lights can also display these optical effects. Moiré patterns “are large-scale interference patterns that can be produced when an opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moiré interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be completely identical, but rather displaced, rotated, or have slightly different pitch.” https://lnkd.in/eTaUqNwu View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on moiré effects in imperfect materials leading to emergent properties, where each part of this sentence is spectacular in its own right. This includes moiré effects created recently by the discovery of the ‘magic angle’. These curious and beautiful optical effects have many applications. https://lnkd.in/eZSgkAEN View in LinkedIn

The closest I can get to visually illustrate emergence. At a distance, towards the perspective vanishing point, does a new pattern emerge. View in LinkedIn

BIRTH OF STARS. “Herbig-Haro jet. Here, we see a Herbig-Haro jet, which spurts out of some newborn stars. After a star forms, there is usually a disk of gas and dust left around it. Complex interactions between this disk and the star’s magnetic field mean that some of the gas ends up being thrown out at incredibly high speeds. The shock wave of the gas ripping through the interstellar medium creates this brightly glowing jet, as seen here.” https://lnkd.in/gu7xi9dj View in LinkedIn

TWO SOURCE OPTIONS. “The detection of anti-4He or heavier nuclei would point to the existence of primordial antimatter from the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, while heavier particles such as antimatter 12C would point to the existence of stellar nucleosynthesis, or dense lumps of antimatter at galactic scale.” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10686-021-09708-w.pdf View in LinkedIn

6TH MASS EXTINCTION. “How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times.” By Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens https://lnkd.in/edxZPhBU View in LinkedIn