It’s science fair season, and right now, all across the U.S., kids are doing what may or may not actually be science in their kitchens and at their dining room tables. What makes something actually science is more a matter of “were the results measured and documented” than “did they follow the scientific method?” This is something I wish more folks understood, and it is something the science paper I’m about to discuss exemplifies in a way that makes me giggle.

I’m just going to start by reading some quotes from the scientists. Alexey Berduygin says: People usually study the electronic properties using tiny electric fields that allow easier analysis and theoretical description. We decided to push the strength of electric fields as much as possible using different experimental tricks not to burn our devices,”

Basically, they turned their device up to eleven.

Collaborator Na Zin adds: We just wondered what could happen at this extreme. To our surprise, it was the Schwinger effect rather than smoke coming out of our set-up.

That Schwinger effect? That means they randomly caused particle-antiparticle pairs to spontaneously form out of a vacuum the electric field was formed in. This is the kind of thing that normally only happens in high-energy environments in space.

Collaborator Roshan Krishna Kumar continues: When we first saw the spectacular characteristics of our superlattice devices, we thought ‘wow … it could be some sort of new superconductivity’. Although the response closely resembles that routinely observed in superconductors, we soon found that the puzzling behavior was not superconductivity but rather something in the domain of astrophysics and particle physics. It is curious to see such parallels between distant disciplines.

Put another way, this team took a “muck about and find out” approach to doing science, and while cranking as large an electric field through their system as they could, instead of destroying it as they thought might happen, they discovered a way to do particle physics. Their device is described in the related press release as having narrow constrictions and superlattices made from graphene, which allowed the researchers to achieve exceptionally strong electric fields in a simple, table-top setup.

This work appears in the journal Science in a paper led by Berduygin that is going to have me giggling for the rest of the day.

By the way, you can’t yet get the graphene parts they used down at Home Depot, so your kid can’t replicate these results on their own, yet.

More Information

The University of Manchester press release“

Out-of-equilibrium criticalities in graphene superlattices,” Alexey I. Berdyugin et al., 2022 Jan 27, Science