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Posted on: 2/20/2013 12:00:00 AM... University of Utah engineers have demonstrated the feasibility of organic materials that conduct electricity on their edges, but act as an insulator inside. These materials, called organic topological insulators, could shuttle information at the speed of light in quantum computers and other high-speed electronic devices.

To generate a topological insulator, scientists have to design materials that can transmit particles called fermions. In a topological insulator, fermions behave like a massless or weightless packet of light, conducting electricity as they move very fast along a material's surface or edges. When these fermions venture inside the material, however, this "weightless" conductivity comes to a halt.

Dirac fermions—a special type of electron—also have a property called spin, or angular momentum around the particle's axis that behaves like a magnetic pole. This property gives scientists another way to place information into a particle because the spin can be switched "up" or "down." Such a mechanism could be useful for spin-based electronic devices, called spintronics, which can store information both in the charge and the spin of electrons.

The University of Utah team reports that it has demonstrated a system with a Dirac fermion in which the spin motion can be manipulated to transmit information. The researchers said that this is advantageous over traditional electronics because it's faster and mitigates concerns about heat dissipation.

The researchers also note that, although inorganic topological insulators based on different materials have been studied for the last decade, organic or molecular topological insulators have not.

For More Information:

• Access "Organic Topological Insulators in Organometallic Lattices"

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