Strain Swings the Resistance of Magic-Angle Graphene by More Than 100 Times That of an Ordinary Metal: University of Washington Study in Science on November 12
Researchers at the University of Washington reported in a paper published in Science on November 12, 2026, that adding strain to magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene produced big swings in the material's electrical resistance. The magic angle is a rotation of about 1.1 degrees between two sheets of carbon one atom thick, at which MIT researchers showed in 2018 that the material can become superconducting when cooled to near absolute zero.
Working in close collaboration with the group of UW physics professor Jiun-Haw Chu, the team attached the tiny flakes to a device that expands and contracts as voltage is applied, so they could continuously control the degree of strain on the lattices. Adjusting the strain produced a change in resistance more than 100 times that in an ordinary metal, an effect further amplified when the sample was cooled to very low temperatures. The paper, by Xuetao Ma and co-authors, is titled Giant elastoresistance in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, with digital object identifier 10.1126/science.adz0597.
Senior author Matthew Yankowitz, a UW associate professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, said atomically thin materials can host superconductivity, magnetism and other exotic quantum states, and that the team has now added a fundamentally new way to manipulate them, by directly deforming the atomic lattice they live on, enabling experiments that were not possible before. Chu said the giant response to strain also appears in other exotic materials, including high-temperature superconductors, and that this common link brings researchers a step closer to understanding what underlies these phenomena.
Source: Science
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 外延石墨烯表面显微图像（资料图）。／Microscopic image of an epitaxial graphene surface (file photo).（Nathan Guisinger, EMMD Group，公共领域，Wikimedia Commons）
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