Graphene is a form of carbon with enough interesting electronic properties to merit the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work in isolating and characterizing graphene. Although its very simplicity—it's a sheet of carbon a single atom thick—can limit its applications, Rahul Nandkishore, L. S. Levitov, and A. V. Chubukov propose a way to create an elusive type of superconductor out of graphene.
Chiral superconductivity may have been seen in strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4), but the phenomenon hasn't really been thoroughly studied experimentally. It differs from both standard superconductivity and high-critical-temperature superconductivity by being one-way: the resistance-free current flows through the material in one direction, but not the opposite way. This effect breaks time-reversal symmetry, and could be useful in constructing quantum computers, among other applications.
A new modeling paper suggests that graphene's electronic properties may allow it to exhibit chiral superconductivity with the addition of impurities, a process familiar from semiconductor technology, where it's known as
doping.
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