Posted on 07/25/2015 5:31:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ok, I read it twice. I kind of get it. I assume ten years from now I will hear about this again when a Nobel prize is given. Then I will never hear of it again.
I have never know a true ‘genius’ level person but I have known a few very, very smart ones. The farther they go up the intelligence scale, the more withdrawn/eccentric by ‘normal’ standards they become. I have a cousin in biotech that is like that. Massively intelligent but not exactly a social butterfly. Never was. Her father was the same way. Things that are regular just arent at all in her field of vision.
The recent discoveries of Dirac fermions in graphene and on the surface of topological insulators have ignited worldwide interest in physics and materials science.
A Weyl semimetal is an unusual crystal where electrons also behave as massless quasi-particles but interestingly they are not Dirac fermions. These massless particles, Weyl fermions, were originally considered in massless quantum electrodynamics but have not been observed as a fundamental particle in nature. A Weyl semimetal provides a condensed matter realization of Weyl fermions, leading to unique transport properties with novel device applications.
Here, we THEORETICALLY identify the first Weyl semimetal in a class of stoichiometric materials (TaAs, NbAs, NbP, TaP), which break crystalline inversion symmetry, including TaAs, TaP, NbAs and NbP. Our first-principles calculation-based predictions on TaAs reveal the spin-polarized Weyl cones and Fermi arc surface states in this compound.
We also observe pairs of Weyl points with the same chiral charge which project onto the same point in the surface Brillouin zone, giving rise to multiple Fermi arcs connecting to a given Weyl point.
Our results show that TaAs is the first topological semimetal identified which does not depend on fine-tuning of chemical composition or magnetic order, greatly facilitating an exploration of Weyl physics in real materials. (Note added: This theoretical prediction of November 2014 (see paper in Nature Communications) was the basis for the first experimental discovery of Weyl Fermions and topological Fermi arcs in TaAs recently published in Science (2015).
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If we were talking about the transistor in the late 40’s you probably could’ve said the same thing.
Tantalum is a rare metal, comprising just 8×10-9 percent of the universe, making it fifteen times less abundant in the universe than gold (which makes up 6×10-8 percent.
...
Gold is rare on Earth because most of it has sunk to the core. About half the recovered gold on Earth comes from an area in South Africa where geological events and an asteroid impact prevented the gold from making it to the core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witwatersrand_Basin
My nephews, respective children of my brothers who were twins, had a friendly rivalry while growing up.
Nephew J said of Nephew A,
"A is so quiet. You just know that when he finally says something, it is going to be something really clever and important," then he paused.
"... and it never is," he continued.
LOL
their paper:
Optimized unconventional superconductivity in a molecular Jahn-Teller metal
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/3/e1500059.full
sorry wrong thread
Yeah, and I’m quasimodo
Who's going to notice?
I take the opposite lesson. This thing is more of a creation than a discovery, a tour de force in applied theory. It’s discovery requires some very particular engineering with that object in mind.
However they got there is well beyond my ability to grasp but ultimately I think we are like amoebas pondering string theory. A Loooooooooooong way fro having clue 1 as to the bigger picture. And probably a lot farther from the ultimate ‘truths’ of science/reality than even that. Thus my ‘don’t know what we don’t know reference.
Exciting stuff regardless though!
LOL, you did. It is for this http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3316687/posts
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