{"id":217904,"date":"2025-07-15T02:17:01","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T07:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/patterns-of-patterns-exploring-supermoire-engineering"},"modified":"2025-07-15T02:17:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T07:17:01","slug":"patterns-of-patterns-exploring-supermoire-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/patterns-of-patterns-exploring-supermoire-engineering","title":{"rendered":"Patterns of patterns: Exploring supermoir\u00e9 engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/patterns-of-patterns-exploring-supermoire-engineering2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A few years ago, physicists were surprised to learn that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/nature26160\" target=\"_blank\">stacking and subtly twisting<\/a> two atomically thin layers of an electronic material like graphene creates a pattern that changes the material\u2019s properties and can even turn it into a superconductor. This superimposed grid, like what would emerge if two window screens were laid slightly askew, is called a moir\u00e9 pattern.<\/p>\n<p>But why stop there? It turns out adding a third layer, with each layer twisted at slightly different angles, produces even more complex interferences known as supermoir\u00e9 patterns (aka moir\u00e9 of moir\u00e9). The supermoir\u00e9 pattern induces profound changes in how electrons move through the material, but until recently, scientists had had trouble measuring exactly what changes occur and why.<\/p>\n<p>Now, applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied <i>Science<\/i>s (SEAS) have used a specially designed microscope to probe the properties of supermoir\u00e9 patterns in trilayer graphene to an extent that was never possible before. Using their microscope, they saw many new states of matter in which electrons would get stuck or form unusual groups, leading to changes in the entire system\u2019s electronic behavior and opening doors to studying layered materials with precisely controllable properties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, physicists were surprised to learn that stacking and subtly twisting two atomically thin layers of an electronic material like graphene creates a pattern that changes the material\u2019s properties and can even turn it into a superconductor. This superimposed grid, like what would emerge if two window screens were laid slightly askew, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}