A University of Arizona physicist has shown that it should be possible to restrict electrons to two dimensions in space by placing conducting materials within strong magnetic fields. The fundamental discovery is important because it says that superconductivity is stable in this strongly magnetic environment.

Stable superconductors are sought by energy, transportation, medical and computing industries.

"It sounds strange, but basically we can change the dimensionality of this world to a two-dimensional, pre-Aristotle world," said Andrei Lebed. (The ancient Greek philosopher Artistotle first reasoned that the Earth was not flat, but curved.) "We can confine electrons to just one plane, two dimensions in space, by applying the magnetic field."

Lebed, who joined the UA as an associate professor of physics in 2004, earned his doctorate in 1986 and his doctor of sciences degree (full professor accreditation) from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics and Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology in 2000. His research has influenced experiments conducted at Princeton University, Boston College, Harvard University, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and elsewhere.

Conventional wisdom says that superconductivity is destroyed at high currents, which are produced in strong magnetic fields, because as current increases, superconductors work only at progressively lower temperatures. Lebed has discovered this isn’t the case in the two-dimensional world.

"My work may definitely lead to superconductivity that survives at ultra-strong magnetic fields because superconductivity is not destroyed by currents in the two-dimensional world. Two-dimensional superconductivity will be stable at extremely high currents and magnetic fields. This work explores new nano-scale properties of solids in a magnetic field," he said.

Lebed and experimental physicists Michael Naughton of Boston College and Heon-Ick Ha of Harvard University published two Physical Review Letters articles in 2003 and 2004 that showed that it is theoretically and experimentally possible to use magnetism to create "standing waves" of electrons within organic (carbon-containing) crystals. The phenomenon has to do with quantum mechanical wave properties of electrons that interfere with, or cancel, waves that would otherwise propagate in three dimensions in Earth’s normal, much weaker, magnetic field.

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