, scientists from the University of California, Irvine describe a new method to make very thin crystals of the element bismuth -- a process that may aid the manufacturing of cheap flexible electronics an everyday reality.
One of the hidden behaviors observed by the team is so-called quantum oscillations originating from the surfaces of the crystals."Quantum oscillations arise from the motion of an electron in a magnetic field," said Laisi Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in physics & astronomy at UC Irvine and one of the lead authors of the paper."If the electron can complete a full orbit around a magnetic field, it can exhibit effects that are important for the performance of electronics.
"Compression is a very common manufacturing technique used for making common household materials such as aluminum foil, but is not commonly used for making electronic materials like those in your computers," Sanchez-Yamagishi added."We believe our method will generalize to other materials, such as tin, selenium, tellurium and related alloys with low melting points, and it could be interesting to explore for future flexible electronic circuits.