Physicists for the first time in history managed to create a superhard two-dimensional body
For the first time in history, an international group of physicists, consisting of representatives from the University of Hannover (Germany) and Innsbruck (Austria), managed to create a superhard body under laboratory conditions. In this case, the resulting material was endowed with the properties of a solid, as well as a superfluid liquid.
Two-dimensional superhard body and the history of its production
The very possibility of the existence of superhard bodies was predicted back in 1969 and at for a long time, scientists around the world have tried to find a superhard state in superfluid helium. But, despite more than a dozen years of studying such a promising material, superhardness has not been found in helium.
For reference. Superhard bodies are a unique material that simultaneously combines properties that are inherent in both solids and superfluid liquids. These unique bodies have an ordered atomic structure and are able to flow without any friction, just like a superfluid liquid.
Only in 2019, scientists still managed to obtain a superhard body, but only in one-dimensional space in the form of a chain of drops.
And finally, an international group of physicists managed to obtain, in the course of numerous laboratory experiments, a crystal-like structure of a superhard material in two dimensions.
As in the case of quantum phenomena, particles in a superhard state are fixed in a solid structure, but at the same time they are also delocalized, and this allows them to flow freely without forming no friction.
The resulting material will allow scientists to conduct a number of experiments with the strangest phenomena of materials science.
Scientists have shared the results of the work done on the pages of the journal Nature.
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