Breaking a 150-Year-Old Law of Physics
6/11/202620 min
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science and National Institute for Materials Science have shown that electrons in ultrapure graphene can behave like a near-frictionless fluid. Near the Dirac point, they form a collective “Dirac fluid,” exhibiting properties similar to exotic states studied in particle physics.
Crucially, the experiments reveal a breakdown of the Wiedemann–Franz law, with heat and charge flowing independently in an unprecedented way. This discovery opens a path to ultra-efficient electronics and precision quantum sensors, while turning graphene into a laboratory for probing extreme physics.
This episode includes AI-generated content.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[gentle instrumental music] Welcome to the Quarkside Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy, and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw, and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
Speaker 2· Host0:19
I want you to imagine something for a second. Imagine you're walking into a university physics lab. You walk past, you know, all the high-tech equipment. You go over to the professor's bookshelf, and you pull down a foundational a hundred and fifty-year-old textbook on how materials work.
Speaker 3· Host0:43
Right.
Speaker 2· Host0:44
And you just, you just toss it right out the window because essentially that is what just happened in the world of quantum physics.
Speaker 3· Host0:51
It really is. I mean, shattered is, is really the only word for it. We are looking at a breakthrough from April twenty twenty-six, and this was spearheaded by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.
Speaker 2· Host1:04
Working alongside the National Institute for Material Science in Japan, right?
Speaker 3· Host1:07
Exactly, yeah. They managed to force electrons inside a simple piece of carbon to behave in a way that, well, classical physics dictates they simply shouldn't be able to.
Speaker 2· Host1:17
They observed electrons flowing inside the single layer of carbon, not like a gas of bouncing particles, which is what we've always been taught- Yeah ... but like a, a, a nearly perfect frictionless liquid.
Speaker 3· Host1:27
Which is wild.
Speaker 2· Host1:28
It's wild to even