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| Credit: Wikimedia Commons |
City College of New York Assistant Professor of Physics Cory Dean, who recently arrived from Columbia University where he was a post-doctoral researcher, and research teams from Columbia and three other institutions have definitively proven the existence of an effect known as Hofstadter’s Butterfly.
The phenomenon, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years. However, it had never been directly observed until now. Confirming its existence may open the door for researchers to uncover completely unknown electrical properties of materials.
“We are now standing at the edge of an entirely new frontier in terms of exploring properties of a system that have never before been realized,” said Professor Dean, who developed the material that allowed the observation. "The ability to generate this effect could possibly be exploited to design new electronic and optoelectronic devices."
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