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Physicists Say Graphene Could Create Mass
eldavojohn writes "Graphene has gotten a lot of press lately. The Nobel prize-winning, fastest-spinning, nanobubble-enhanced silicon replacement is theorized to have a new, more outlandish property. As reported by Technology Review's Physics Blog, graphene should be able to create mass inside properly formed nanotubes. According to Abdulaziz Alhaidari's calculations, if one were to roll up graphene into a nanotube, this could compactifiy dimensions (from the sheet's two down to the tube's one), and thus 'the massless equations that describe the behavior of electrons and holes will change to include a term for mass. In effect, compactifying dimensions creates mass.' What once would require a massive high-energy particle accelerator can now be tested with carbon, electricity, and wires, according to the recent paper."
Scientists have now isolated the particle that causes this strange mass inducing effect, and have dubbed it the "YoMamma".
which is totally what she said
What once would require a massive high-energy particle accelerator can now be tested with carbon, electricity, and wires, according to the recent paper."
Out of the garage, into the lab, back to the garage. Bill Nye must be so proud :)
Living With a Nerd
Well now... That changes everyhing! (if true).
Is this just a math trick, or what is going on here? I'm pretty sure "we're creating mass" is not literally what's happening, but I can't make heads or tails of it.
I read the internet for the articles.
This sounds like a very complicated way of saying "The toothpaste tube makes more toothpaste when you aren't using it."
A wise man once said, "Where is my other quotation mark?
I said, "No way!", but mathematics said, "All your English are belong to us."
I'll alert Saudi Arabia and arrange for them to declare jihad on these scientists and their sharp pencils!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
the Mass Effect.
Nice to see one man's calculations relegate mankind's most advanced and complicated machine to obsolescence.
...but it's being spelled "compactifiy" with an extra "i" in the summary. Double sigh.
You can't prove anything about high-energy physics based on analogous systems in condensed matter physics. The equations describing the orbit of the Earth around the Sun (Newton's gravitation) are the same as those thought to describe the orbit of an electron around a hydrogen nucleus (Coulomb's law). Does the Earth's orbit prove that's how the atom works? NO! You forgot quantum mechanics, you idiots! Analogy is NOT identity! Stop printing these dumb-ass fucking articles. Ugh! (IAA(very angry)PP)
Fake mass = artificial gravity?
Sorry, but I call BS. A graphene sheet is NOT two dimensional and after rolling it into a tube, it is NOT one dimensional. One dimension very thin != lack of dimension.
last time I looked, tubes had 2 dimensions... diameter and length...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This is either total crap or Nobel Prize material. I'm not qualified to say which. Who's endorsing this paper?
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
He's not a Muslim, you dumbass. Anyone can extrapolate from his name that he's clearly Japanese.
I'm sorry, but "compactifying" just sounds so much like something Larry the Cable Guy would say...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Of course you know that centrifugal force is not a real force, but a pseudo force you conjure up if you are working on a reference frame attached to the train. From an inertial frame of reference, your velocity is being changed constantly. Change in velocity is acceleration. The change in direction would be towards the center of the circular track. That acceleration is centripetal acceleration. The train is exerting a force centripetal force on you. The reaction from your body on to the train for that force times friction coefficient gives you the force that is holding you still stuck like a fly on the wall of a train moving in a circular track.
As one who has spent years hanging on to the window bars of trains and buses in Chennai, India, let me tell you, no matter how many Einsteins tell you that is a pseudo force, it felt real and that I am still living, not having been run over decades ago by the next bus or train proves that centrifugal force is real. Not pseudo.
Similarly the fermions seem to be having a mass to satisfy some equation in some frame of reference after some coordinate transformation. But really it is not creating any mass.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Would "compactifying dimensions" allow sub-ground states of Hydrogen, for example? Would fusion be easier to make happen inside a graphene nanotube?
Is all about Compactification!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Inertia Drive.
"Squishing"!
Revive the Constitution.
So, if I'm understanding correctly, when when electrons move along a 2d surface, one doesn't have to account for their mass. When they are forced to move along one dimension, their masses have to be taken into account. We're not actually creating mass, but mass now has to be factored into the electron behavior. Is this because they're more likely to collide, or are at least close enough that mass/gravity becomes a factor? Is this even close to a lay-understanding of what's going on?
It's a real bitch trying to squeeze those last few electrons out of the bottom of a massless graphene tube
The bogon.
Seriously, can't anyone at Tech Review spot the flaw here? A tube still has more than one dimension. Even if you managed to create a chain of single carbon atoms, you'd still have multiple dimensions, in that the atoms comprising the chain are not infinitely short and infinitely flat.
Bah. Sensationalist nonsense non-news.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
With the partical accelerator analogy the mass of an accelerated object increases as it's given more energy by the accelerator.
I assume anything with even the smallest amount of mass will still require massive amounts of input energy...? (e=mc2)
Can we use this to make atomic batteries?
This is the first really useful explanation of the mechanism at work in what the paper authors are trying to describe. If only theoretical physicists and tech blog writers were so lucid in their writing.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
We finally found it. If we make enough graphene sheets, we could save the universe from the big freeze, generating enough mass to make the universe to be cyclical.
What is more, considering the color of the coal, maybe we finally found that predicted "dark matter" that could had done that effect.
Cheers, thanks. The main issue is that the blog really made a hash of the explanation with sensationalist claptrap:
... which is utter hokum. Further down the page, there are a couple breakdowns of the paper itself, which make it clear that what they're doing is what you say -- constraining the physics of a potential experiment to simplify the mathematics involved.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Nice explanation, thx But why does your train need to be infinitely long? I would argue an infinitely long train has quite a problem driving in circles. Unless of course you hook the front of the loc to the end of the last wagon...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I'm on my way to a cold fusion seminar given by Professor Ponzi. Please respond ASAP.
So you believe article headline?
I've got a bridge you could buy, cheap.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's amazing to think that physicists working in small teams with relatively inexpensive equipment might possibly produce observations and data rivaling that produced by something like the LHC. OTOH, it sort of reminds me of the whole cold fusion fiasco.
If there's a physicist out there, I get the impression that somehow leptons are being converted to fermions?
Leptons (e..g electron) are fermions. However there is something very fishy with this paper. For example 10^6 m/s is not relativistic. If you calculate the gamma factor (gamma=1 is what Newtonian physics assumes) you get 1.0000056. This means they are very non-relativistic and Schrodinger should work fine for them unless there is some subtle effect at play. Indeed to give electrons this energy you need to accelerate them through a potential of 2.8 volts so rather than needed a particle accelerator any one with a vacuum pump, a vacuum-tight container, some wire and two AA batteries can experience the fun of "relativistic" electrons.
What I suspect is happening is that the conditions on graphene have altered the electron behaviour so, rather than test anything fundamental, you are testing the properties of electrons on graphene. You cannot do real relativistic physics with this because if you get an unexpected result you have no idea whether it is because there is some new, unexpected physics at work or whether your approximation of the environment is simply wrong and you need to use a different model for it. Hence, while interesting, this is not the way to do real, relativistic physics: for that you need something that is truly relativistic, not just something which might, under certain conditions, act like something relativistic.
This sounds like a theoretical basis for a warp drive. If that which is massless can be made to have mass, one could imagine a strip of graphene that rolls up to form a nanotube further up the strip. Put a charge on the array and you create mass, which will fall back toward the bulk of the ship. when it falls out of the nanotube and back into the graphene, the mass disappears, leaving you with net forward thrust Find a way to dynamically zip/unzip the nanotube, and you should be able to use a flow of current going toward your ship and flowing into and out of the nanotube/graphene transition to produce net thrust. If both materials happen to be superconducting, then you get thrust with NO ENERGY INPUT. With no energy input required, FTL might become possible, as your acceleration is due to gravity rather than thrust, and the increase in mass cancels because the device producing the thrust is gaining mass in direct proportion.
It seems fantastical, but if the theory and math are correct, it might just be true.
One step closer to biotics and mass relays
Itth not a math trick, itth a *mathth* trick.
Infuriate left and right
According to Abdulaziz Alhaidari's calculations, if one were to roll up graphene into a nanotube, this could compactify dimensions (from the sheet's two down to the tube's one),...
The sentence above conveys a wrong impression that tube is one dimensional. Dimensionality of a tube is still the same as of the plane and it is still two. What is different is its topology. Tube has one one dimension with a topology of a line (infinite in both directions) and another one which is a circle and is compact. And it, indeed, could cause some strange effects like pseudo-mass.
Sounds like Abdul Alhazred to me. There is clearly a Chthulu connection there.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I expect him to constantly denigrate women, act belligerent to the point of violence towards people with different beliefs (including fellow Muslims), and protest loudly when he is treated in-kind. You know, typical Muslim behavior...
Hey, has anyone heard from Juan Williams recently. I haven't heard him on NPR this week...
Has anyone told the Pope/Vatican? My mind is currently racing trying to work out the structure of a graphene Mass.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
mod this down if you don't like surfer speak
Our laws of physics are supposedly only local to our area of space.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Like Newton said: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". If there is a centripetal force exerted on your body by the train, then there is a centrifugal force exterted on the train by your body. Neither of these forces is in any way "pseudo", and neither is your centripetally accelerated frame of reference is in any way "invalid". All these mind games about "pseudo forces" are nothing but linguistic mismatches between the pedantic physicists and the rest of us.
After reading this, I don't see how it is different from a semi-conducting carbon nanotube (CNT), which also has gap and finite effective mass. The author cited Dresselhaus' review on carbon material, but didn't bother to make the connection.
They took Dirac's equation (which is an continuous approximation for graphene as long as the physics you are interested in do not involve length scale comparable to lattice size), and imposed periodic boundary condition to it. This is the same thing one do to find the spectrum for CNT. In fact, for CNT you HAVE to care about how the lattice match up because depending on the way the two boundaries commensurate, CNT can be either metal (gapless, massless) or semi-conducting (with gap and mass). So this "creating mass" thing are already done in semi-conducting nanotube. For engineering, it's been utterly boring because the gap is so small. Otherwise we would have CNT electronic by now.
The paper reads like an exercise one gives to an physics student. It makes no novel prediction, propose no experiment. It has a thought experiment about making a flat-rolled-flat graphene region and study some transport through it. But it offers no clue about how to do that or estimate how hard it would be given say the bending rigidity of graphene. Side note: freestanding graphene is not stable and tends to completely roll in to CNT. One usually, as the Nobel prize winner did, need a substrate that it will stick to, SiO2 in their case. This is why CNT predates graphene by two decades.
Just because something is posted on arxiv with a provocative title doesn't make it a worthy paper.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Sounds like they are trying to make the world's smallest spliff.....
New title: Graphene Creates Press
All I know is that this sh*t only makes sense when I smoke a little mass.
It is a shame that articles of such a low quality end up being highlighted on Slashdot. There
are countless review articles describing properties of quasiparticle dispersion in graphene
and nanotubes (in the non-interacting approximation and beyond). The manuscript on the
arXiv contains nothing remotely new, and should not have appeared on Slashdot.
In general, the selection of physics-related news on Slashdot is atrocious. Crackpot and
ridiculously overhyped papers that are void of any new or useful content regularly make it to the front-page.
Anyone wonders what happened to
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/27/2019244/Possible-Room-Temperature-Superconductor-Achieved
or
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/12/1916247/New-Superconductor-World-Record-Surpasses-250K
?
Please stop polluting Slashdot with unreviewed crap that would never be published in any decent journal.
Subby,
Why did you verbify a verb?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!