A team of international scientists has announced what could be a completely new state of matter, so far known as ‘a quantum spin liquid’, found in graphene.

First theorised 40 years ago, decades before the discovery of graphene, the researchers found that the quantum spin liquid state caused electrons within the two-dimensional structure to disintegrate.

Led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US, the team was able to match Majorana fermions (zero-energy particles that act as their own antiparticles) with the same model for a Kitaev model, named after the Russian-American physicist Alexei Kitaev best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm.

Published in Nature Materials, the discovery has come as somewhat of a surprise even to its researchers, who have said that the quantum spin liquids are among the most mysterious states of matter and theorised as being hidden only in certain magnetic materials.

“Until recently, we didn’t even know what the experimental fingerprints of a quantum spin liquid would look like. One thing we’ve done in previous work is to ask, ‘if I were performing experiments on a possible quantum spin liquid, what would I observe’?” said co-author Dr Dmitry Kovrizhin.

The team hope that their discovery will one day be utilised in quantum computer applications.

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