Quantum Auto-Correct and Configurable Materials
Making the chaotic universe a little less chaotic
The universe in almost every instance seems to have a certain affinity for chaos. All sealed systems have a tendency to become more disorganized as time goes on. Ice melts, stars explode, corpses decompose, and a cup of hot tea gradually becomes colder as the thermal energy is dispersed into the environment. These are just facts of life. They are all owed to the law of entropy, and this appears as fundamental and infallible a law of the universe as the law of energy conservation or the speed of light in a vacuum. With this being said, reality does not universally prevent a semblance of order emerging in some systems. Before you get a false sense of the subject of this article, no, I am not contesting the law of entropy. It is absolute and gives the most certain view of the future in existence. However one instance of physics forcing a system to become more orderly has recently been discovered by Physicists Prof. Swastik Kar and Prof. Arun Bansil at Northeastern university.
For those of you who have any knowledge of computers, it is likely that you are familiar with transistors: those little devices that allow facilitate binary signals, which are the fabric of all digital processes. They are typically made from silicon wafers — that is to say, ultra-thin sheets of silicon stacked on top of one another. These devices, while astounding in the way that they allow modern computers to function, are seriously hindered by their material limitations. It has been the traditional view that silicon wafers of exactly the same dimensions are required in order for proper alignment between the sheets of the wafers to be achieved.
Well, that traditional view has just been blown out of the water, as the Northeastern University Physicists have shown, having successfully combined two entirely dissimilar crystals: MoS₂ and Bi₂Se₃. These crystals were found to simply rotate with respect to one another until they formed a stable state, and in doing so began to present certain new properties, such as total photoluminescence suppression. Even more astoundingly, if the crystal interface was disrupted by a laser, it resulted in a complete 180 on some of the usual properties. For example, instead of 100% photoluminescence suppression, it began to exhibit 0%. To emphasize how astounding this is, Prof. Kar analogized it as: “…if you had cake, and then you twisted it around and it became a biscuit.”
A question that has likely crossed your mind here is: how does this not violate the law of entropy? They are taking two objects, placing them near one another, and the objects are forcing themselves together to create a new and more organized system. Unfortunately this is the same misconception that leads people to label life as a violation of entropy, as humans are extremely ordered systems that seem to emerge naturally. The key is in the exact wording of the law of entropy: Every sealed system tends to increase in entropy. Essentially, you must look at the big picture here and account for the absolutely massive increase in entropy of the environment around humans or the crystals; with the vast amounts of expended energy and materials reduced to allow a human to be born or the crystals to be brought together, the net entropy has certainly gone up.
This new and unforeseen property has potentially ground-breaking implications in the fields of optics, computing, and semi-conductors.
Journal:
Vargas, Anthony, et al. “Tunable and Laser-Reconfigurable 2D Heterocrystals Obtained by Epitaxial Stacking of Crystallographically Incommensurate Bi2Se3 and MoS2 Atomic Layers.” Science Advances, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 14 July 2017, advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1601741.
