electron brainsprain

Yeah.. it's "true". Inside of materials (the math works out easier if the materials are crystals.) electrons behave like they have a different mass.. the e's take on some properties that are due to the crystal periodicity/ spacing. Solid State Physics. (The holes have a different mass too.)

George H.

Almost a hundred years ago.

It's a direct consequence of band structure- electrons in bulk semiconduc tors become quasiparticles and no longer behave as they do in vacuum becaus e their charge/mass ratio is fixed, and in a semiconductor the environment determines its effective charge, seesawing its effective mass. More or less .

It's the physics that underlies electronics- it's complicated but it all disappears at the terminals. Mostly.

Mark L. Fergerson

E=mC^2?

About 0.002% of these gee-whiz breakthroughs make it to production.

I am *so* tired of carbon nanotubes. It's time for the next stupid fad.

Surely you'd use a carbon-nanotube transistor if you could buy it as a component?

None of us in remotely interested in gee-whiz breakthroughs until they show up as gee-whiz components.

The fad is only stupid when the gee-whiz boys have all given up on getting to a component. Cold fusion may be there by now, but carbon nanotubes are still worth speculating about.

It would be nice if the speculations were aimed more precisely at the venture capitalists who might be interested.

topological insulators? (though I think this is ~10 yrs old.)

George H.

Physics is so faddish. The various science mags and web sites are all turning into Popular Mechanics, and every university now has a press-release engine.

So far, the only viable semiconductor memories are sram, dram, and floating-gate stuff.

The fads of the past include

magnetic bubble Ovonics memristors superconductive switches first-gen nanotubes (mass production by 2006!) second-gen nanotubes spin stuff fram (works in small versions) some sort of oxide punch-through stuff and some I forget

Nantero has been fiddling with nanotubes for 15 years now.

On Oct 21, 2016, Wond wrote (in article ):

Many years ago. This is an effective mass when traveling in a solid. Holes also have an effective mass, even though there is no election there.

Electrons in free space are not affected.

Joe Gwinn

Hey, I'm just getting started with them; it's too soon to stop now! My RIS-769 is a bench-top carbon-nanotube generator. Take a syringe pump and add +20kV and -4kV.

Most nanotube generators make mats of stuff that looks like soot, a smaller version of cat hair clumps. The problem is to collect billions of tiny tubes and glue them down in the right places on silicon (graphene?) wafers.

Nantero tries to work with the felt-like clumps without organizing them. Lots of luck.

Try "act like they have different masses". It's complicated because it's quantum mechanics and in a crystal the electrons are acting like waves -- and I don't understand it anyway -- but I find using the modifier "act like" lets me understand enough and not go nuts.

We're using it as a substrate for triple- junction solar cells. But I heard that if you add a transverse field, they'll line up.

What a whiny little girl. You bitch about people trying new ideas and that they don't all make it to production (even though several of the items you list have been in production or *are* in current production).

From what I read, the Nantero invention is going into production as we speak. At least Fujitsu seems to disagree with you.

When rotating disk drives are replaced by SSDs are you going to complain that magnetic disks were just a fad?

In geological terms, rotating magnetics are probably just a fad. I doubt that they'll still be in use when North America bumps into Asia.

Half a century ago, my quantum mechanics professor said: "If it does not feel weird, you have not understood anything".

oubt

Rotating magnetics has been keeping Earth safe from a bad solar wind sunbur n for awhile now. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Spintronics is a real technology--that's what MRAM is based on.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Digikey has 16 Mbit, 35 ns mram parts for $40 each.

Certainly some new physics will eventually replace dram and flash. I just wish the ovonics and memristor and nanotube and other guys would not keep announcing mass production in two years.

But this, too, will pass.