A team of scientists from Columbia, Nanjing University, Princeton, and the University of Munster, writing in the journal Nature, have presented the first experimental evidence of collective excitations with spin called chiral graviton modes (CGMs) in a semiconducting material.
A CGM appears to be similar to a graviton, a yet-to-be-discovered elementary particle better known in high-energy quantum physics for hypothetically giving rise to gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe, whose ultimate cause remains mysterious.
The ability to study graviton-like particles in the lab could help fill critical gaps between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, solving a major dilemma in physics and expanding our understanding of the universe.
“Our experiment marks the first experimental substantiation of this concept of gravitons, posited by pioneering works in quantum gravity since the 1930s, in a condensed matter system,” said Lingjie Du, a former Columbia postdoc and senior author on the paper.
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