Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

Quantum scars make their mark in graphene

By patterning an ultrathin layered structure with tiny wells, physicists have created and imaged peculiar states known as quantum scars — revealing behaviour that could be used to boost the performance of electronic devices.
  1. Dmitry Abanin

    1. Dmitry Abanin is in the Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Maksym Serbyn

    1. Maksym Serbyn is at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Imagine a ball bouncing off the sides of a stadium-shaped billiard table. Regardless of where the ball starts, its trajectory will eventually cover the whole table, and it will do so in a seemingly irregular manner — in sharp contrast to the way in which a planet orbits a star, for example. This unpredictability is a hallmark of chaos, but if the ball is actually a quantum-mechanical particle, its chaotic behaviour manifests in the appearance of curious states that were predicted four decades ago1. These ‘quantum scars’ have now been visualized directly in a solid-state system, which Ge et al.2 report on in Nature.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 635, 825-826 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03649-y

References

  1. Heller, E. J. Phys. Rev. Lett. 53, 1515–1518 (1984).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Ge, Z. et al. Nature 635, 841–846 (2024).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Blümel, R., Davidson, I. H., Reinhardt, W. P., Lin, H. & Sharnoff, M. Phys. Rev. A 45, 2641 (1992).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Kudrolli, A., Abraham, M. C. & Gollub, J. P. Phys. Rev. E 63, 026208 (2001).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Burke, A. M. et al. J. Phys. Condens. Matter 21, 212201 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Burke, A. M. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 176801 (2010).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Ferry, D. K. et al. Semicond. Sci. Technol. 26, 043001 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Ge, Z. et al. Nano Lett. 20, 8682–8688 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Huang, L., Lai, Y.-C., Ferry, D. K., Goodnick, S. M. & Akis, R. Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 054101 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Huang, L., Xu, H.-Y., Grebogi, C. & Lai, Y.-C. Phys. Rep. 753, 1–128 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Luukko, P. J. J. et al. Sci. Rep. 6, 37656 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Serbyn, M., Abanin, D. A. & Papić, Z. Nature Phys. 17, 675–685 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Moudgalya, S., Bernevig, B. A. & Regnault, N. Rep. Prog. Phys. 85, 086501 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links