James' World 2

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Chloe Cushman

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For over a decade, scientists have attempted to synthesize a new form of carbon called graphene with limited success. That endeavor is now at an end, though, thanks to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder. Graphyne has long been of interest to scientists because of its similarities to the “wonder material” graphene—another form of carbon that is highly valued by industry whose research was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. However, despite decades of work and theorizing, only a few fragments have ever been created before now.

This research, announced last week in Nature Synthesis, fills a long-standing gap in carbon material science, potentially opening brand-new possibilities for electronics, optics, and semiconducting material research.

“The whole audience, the whole field, is really excited that this long-standing problem, or this imaginary material, is finally getting realized,” said Yiming Hu, lead author on the paper and 2022 doctoral graduate in chemistry.

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The crystal structure of a layer of graphyne. Credit: Yiming Hu

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General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein’s description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Recent work that tries to bring those theories together is revealing some mind-bending truths. In this episode, the physicist and author Sean Carroll talks with host Steven Strogatz about how space and time might be emergent properties of quantum reality, not fundamental parts of it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.

Transcript

Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mysteries of space and time, and gravity, too. What’s so mysterious about them?

Well, it turns out they get really weird when we look at them at their deepest levels, at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in and become crucial. Of course, none of us have any direct experience with space and time and gravity at this unbelievably small scale. Up here, at the scale of everyday life, space and time seem perfectly smooth and continuous. And gravity is very well described by Isaac Newton’s classic theory, a theory that’s been around for over 300 years now.

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Michael Driver for Quanta Magazine

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Classical physics did not need any disclaimers. The kind of physics that was born with Isaac Newton and ruled until the early 1900s seemed pretty straightforward: Matter was like little billiard balls. It accelerated or decelerated when exposed to forces. None of this needed any special interpretations attached. The details could get messy, but there was nothing weird about it. 

Then came quantum mechanics, and everything got weird really fast.  

Quantum mechanics is the physics of atomic-scale phenomena, and it is the most successful theory we have ever developed. So why are there a thousand competing interpretations of the theory? Why does quantum mechanics need an interpretation at all? 

What, fundamentally, is it trying to tell us?

Affairs of state

There are many weirdnesses in quantum physics — many ways it differs from the classical worldview of perfectly knowable particles with perfectly describable properties. The weirdness you focus on will tend to be the one that shapes your favorite interpretation. 

But the weirdness that has stood out most, the one that has shaped the most interpretations, is the nature of “superpositions” and of measurement in quantum mechanics.

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Credit: Lucid Pixel / Adobe Stock

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Hydrogen could be an important part of our future energy supply: It can be stored, transported, and burned as needed. However, most of the hydrogen available today is a by-product of natural gas production, and this has to change for climate protection reasons. The best strategy so far to produce environmentally friendly “green hydrogen” is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity that comes from renewable energy sources, for example, photovoltaic cells.

However, it would be much easier if sunlight could be used directly to split water. This is exactly what new catalysts are now making possible, in a process called “photocatalytic water splitting.” The concept is not yet used industrially. At TU Wien, important steps have now been taken in this direction: on an atomic scale, scientists have realized a new combination of molecular and solid-state catalysts that can do the job while using relatively inexpensive materials.

Interaction of atoms

“Actually, to be able to split water with light you have to solve two tasks at the same time,” says Alexey Cherevan from the Institute for Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “We have to think about oxygen and about hydrogen. The oxygen atoms of the water must be transformed into O₂ molecules, and the remaining hydrogen ions—which are just protons—must be turned into H2 molecules.”

Solutions have now been found for both tasks. Tiny inorganic clusters consisting of only a small number of atoms are anchored on a surface of light-absorbing support structures such as titanium oxide. The combination of clusters and carefully chosen semiconductor supports lead to the desired behavior.

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Structural models of two clusters that enable water splitting into O2 and H2 by means of light energy. Credit: Vienna University of Technology

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