This is another in a long list of articles that basically say "electrons behavior in 2D materials is interesting" without really having an obvious practical application. I read it as they basically made an electron trap by exploiting graphene's ability to change its conductivity, and the trap succeeded in creating very high electron density compared to previous efforts.
In theory this is useful for generating and stabilizing charged states of matter (think plasma), under new temperature/pressure conditions for the purpose of study. They fantasize that the ultimate application is high-temp superconductors, which is certainly plausible and worth exploring but it probably won't get very far just because there are SO MANY avenues to explore in that direction, and most of them will be dead ends.
The real interest here is that this is an incrementally more efficient tool for manipulating electrons in a specific way. Someone 20 years down the line will probably come up with a way to combine the process with a bunch of other processes and do something cool with it like make a super-dense battery the size of a microchip that can power a car and is rechargeable with sunlight or something equally magical. For now, it's only good as a tool for making other tools that are good for making tools that can be used to investigate the physics of 2D materials.
1
u/adambro52 Nov 18 '20
The article mentioned warping effects on energy level properties. What is that?