"MIT Scientists Achieve Alchemy: Transforming Pencil Lead into Gold"

MIT physicists have discovered that stacking five ultrathin flakes of graphite in a specific order can create a material with three unique properties never seen before in natural graphite. The material, called pentalayer rhombohedral stacked graphene, exhibits electron correlation, allowing electrons to communicate with each other. By attaching electrodes to the material, the researchers were able to tune the system and observe three different phenomena depending on the number of electrons present: insulating, magnetic, or topological behavior. This discovery opens up new possibilities for studying strongly correlated and topological physics.