Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast. Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett. For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists. The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Hario Herrero announced

the find of the decade. Researchers stacked one flat sheet of carbon atoms on top of another,

applied a magic 1.1 degree twist between them, then cooled the atomic wafers to nearly absolute zero.

The sample then became a perfect conduit of electrons. But was this a fluke? That's next.

Explore math mysteries in the Quanta book, The Prime Number Conspiracy, published by the MIT Press.

Available now at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, or your local bookstore.

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When researchers did their magical stacking, how were the particles conspiring to slip flawlessly

through the graphene sheets? The kaleidoscope moray pattern created by the skew

angle seemed significant, but no one knew for sure. To find out, researchers started twisting and

stacking every material they could get their hands on. At first, the electrons played along.

Experiment after experiment found that in an array of flat materials, frigid temperatures brought plummeting electric resistance.

A more profound understanding of the conditions necessary for ideal conduction felt close,

and with it a tantalizing step toward an electronics

revolution. Here's Matthew Yankowitz, a condensed to matter physicist at the University of

Washington. What first emerged is it seemed like supercontativity was everywhere. No matter what system

you looked at, it seemed like you found superconductivity.

Then we started to learn that actually, even knowing what a superconductor is and a two-dimensional

material is not so straightforward. As researchers inspected their samples more carefully,

the instances of superconductivity vanished. In some materials, resistance wasn't actually getting down to zero.

In others, different tests ended up with conflicting results. Only in the original double-layered

...