[music]
Miles O’Brien: For Josh Goldberger,
this sight never gets old.
[music]
Miles O’Brien: This is a crystal,
growing inside what’s called a floating zone furnace.
Give it a few hours to run,
and the end result is a single, nearly flawless crystal,
as big as a pencil.
Josh Goldberger: My group is really interested
in creating new families of materials,
but particularly electronic materials.
Miles O’Brien: Goldberger’s creation is
a crystal of what’s called “rhenium silicide.”
It may look pretty modest now,
but crystals like this may one day re-write the book
on how electronics operate.
Josh Goldberger: So, we’re looking into
lots of different applications
for this new discovery, this new family of materials,
and electronics is one of them.
There’s a 30-year valley from a discovery
to actual commercialization. We’re on “Year One.”
Miles O’Brien: It all starts here,
at the Bulk Crystal Growth Facility
at Johns Hopkins University.
[tapping]
Miles O’Brien: It’s part of a larger
Materials Innovation Platform called PARADIM,
funded by the National Science Foundation.
They’re working to make ground-breaking
advances in materials science.
Darrell Schlom: We are the only location
in the United States
that has all of these crystal growth methods,
the most unique and up to date crystal growth methods
and it’s open to users like Josh.
Adam Phelan: A lot of these crystals,
they’re not necessarily like we learned to do in science class
where you grow rock candy, or you evaporate water to grow,
you know, salt single crystals.
A lot of these materials had very high melting points
or very high vapor pressures.
Josh Goldberger: Rhenium silicide has
an incredibly high melting point.
In order to grow a crystal of it,
we need to get to 3600 degrees Fahrenheit.
That’s hot enough to melt bricks.
Miles O’Brien: They need big, pure crystals
in order to study what have turned out
to be intriguing “quantum” properties.
Josh Goldberger: There’s a lot of different ideas
behind what makes a material a quantum material.
It’s a very broad idea.
Our project is all about electrons.
I view a quantum material as a material
in which electrons move in mysterious ways.
Miles O’Brien: Today’s electronic materials
are largely silicon-based.
Sprinkle in what are called “impurities,”
like boron and phosphorus,
and electricity can start flowing.
Depending on which impurities you use,
the current will be either positively
or negatively charged,
forcing it to flow in one direction.
A device, like say a smart phone,
has a complicated mash-up
of many of these electronic components
that are carefully configured to work together.
But what if one material could do it all
with much faster performance?
Josh Goldberger: We found a new kind of
electronic material
in which negative charge travels one-way through a material
and positive charge travels simultaneously
through a different direction through the crystal.
Miles O’Brien: This quantum behavior was so new
it didn’t even have a name.
Josh Goldberger: So, we came up with this word
to call this. We call it “goniopolar” materials.
It comes from the Greek prefix “gonio,” meaning angle,
and “polar,” meaning a conduction polarity,
negative charge or positive charge.
Miles O’Brien: Lot of testing goes into
making sure the crystals are pure
and that they understand their structure,
and performance, and they’re figuring out
how to engineer these quantum properties
into other materials. Rhenium is pretty rare.
Josh Goldberger: At best,
there’s maybe a couple of tons that are mined every year
and so that is nothing compared to silicon,
which you can just get from sand on the beach
for instance, right?
Miles O’Brien: But other “goniopolar” materials
made of more common elements
could one day make sense for industrial-scale use.
Joshua Goldberger: When I started this research,
I used to think that we were looking
for a needle in a haystack,
and now that we’ve made a couple of new goniopolar materials,
now I realize that we’re not looking
for a needle in a haystack.
We’re looking for like a bright red pin cushion
full of needles inside the haystack.
Miles O’Brien: Designing new crystals
with unique quantum properties,
paving the way for breakthroughs in electronics.
For Science Nation, I’m Miles O’Brien.