Volodya Miransky has only one thing to say about the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics winners.
Volodya Miransky
“I know those guys,” says The University of Western Ontario’s Applied Mathematics Department professor.
The prize was awarded this October to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov who, in 2004, were the first to isolate and demonstrate the properties of graphene. Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a chicken wire pattern, is often called a two-dimensional substance as it stands only one-atom thick.
Prior to the discovery, researchers theorized what the properties of monolayer and bilayer graphite would be. Geim and Novoselov invented a method of separating the one atom-thick sheets of this material from pencil lead using sticky tape, which was both fortuitous and brilliant. However the breakthrough came in visualizing the lattice of the graphite monolayers.
When these graphite samples were placed on 300 nanometres-thick silica wafers, Geim and Novoselov were able to see the monolayers through an optical microscope. It turns out that if the thickness of the silica platform varied as little as 15 nanometers the single layer of graphite would be rendered completely invisible. “It was just luck,” Miransky says. “I believe that it is connected with Geim’s character. He’s kind of a playful guy and on the other hand he is very confident.”
But when it came to investigating the electronic behavior of these sheets, Geim and Novoselov came up with some findings that puzzled them. It seems the electrons flowed differently than they expected through the material.
Luckily, the answer to that mystery had already been solved by equations derived years earlier by Miransky and his graduate students.
The foundation for this research was set in 1994 when Miransky visited Western and presented a work intent on showing a new phenomenon in particle physics. In it, he considered how massless particles that are attracted to each other (such as electrons and positrons) would act in materials one-atom thick and two dimensions within a magnetic field.
Miransky, and his graduate students V.P. Gusynin and I.A. Shokovy, calculated these particles would necessarily acquire a mass.
“We still did not understand what we did,” Miransky says. “This effect was realized in a particular model. I gave a talk and the reaction was not exciting. I felt that something was wrong and it was also a trigger for me to start thinking harder and then I recognized that this wasn’t just a model, it was a general effect. … It is now called ‘magnetic catalysis.”
Magnetic catalysis shows that in two dimensions a magnetic field is a strong catalyst leading to generate a dynamical mass even at the weakest attractive interaction.
“This is an absolutely universal effect. It always happens when you have this attraction,” Miransky adds. “We understood in principle that it could be useful for condensed matter, but we did nothing about graphite in 1994. This was the first step. We tried to find some application in cosmology but it was not easy to do for many reasons.”
It wasn’t until 2001 when one of Miransky’s co-authors met up with a colleague in North Carolina who tried to explain some experiments in graphite. Then in 2002, Miransky and his co-authors published a paper where they considered the quantum electrodynamic properties of two-dimensional graphite, two years before Geim and Novoselov produced graphene.
“When they produced this material they did not know the properties, they did not know by themselves that these relativistic like dynamics could be useful.”
After the 2002 paper, Miransky returned to particle physics while Gusynin remained interested in exploring graphite.
In 2004, when Geim and Novoselov isolated graphene, “very few people in the world were interested in that stuff and (Gusynin) was one of them.” Eventually the Geim and Novoselov experimental group started studying the electronic properties of graphene in a magnetic field, they saw the right type of results but the values obtained were off by a half step from those in conventional semiconductors.
“We had the expression they needed and, of course, Gusynin knew this expression because he was the co-author.” When Gusynin had seen Geim and Novoselov’s results he recognized that this was the effect of massless relativistic like particles. Miransky says this property of graphene “is different from all stuff known before.”
“Of course, when all of these things happened, I returned back to work with Gusynin and two other of my former graduate students, Gorbar and Shovkovy and we found that magnetic catalysis, which produced masses and gaps, works.”
Now, researchers from around the world have succeeded in producing larger sheets of graphene as well as single-layer grahene devices. Since charges carriers move so easily through the substance, it is a prime candidate to replace silicon in high speed computer chips, solar cells and touch screen displays.
The success of this work resulted in Miransky being invited to speak at the Nobel Symposium on Graphene and Quantum Matter in Stockholm this past May. The results from graphene also helped Miransky in his work on particle physics for relativistic matter in three-dimensional materials.
“It actually led to some interesting results for compact stars composed of quarks,” he says.
In 2007, Miransky was part of a group who had won the Ukraine State Prize for Science and Engineering. The prize was awarded for his contribution in the 1970s concerning the “Effects of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Phase Transitions in Elementary Particle Physics and Condensed Matter.”
At the time, Miransky credited his success to the advice he read in high school in a book called “I am a Mathematician” by Norbert Wiener.
Miransky says Weiner “mentioned that for a young researcher it’s very important to pick the right problem. He described that the problem should not be hopeless or extremely difficult, on the other hand it should not be trivial. The problem should create a direction you could work on for a while, say, 10 years or 15 years.”
Miransky claims there was another factor that came into play. In his early 20s, he was searching for that problem but no such luck, “Actually, at some point some idea appeared and it led to a series of papers and some interest in the world. I was already 30 at the time, which is not very young for a physicist, but not very old on the other hand. That was one of the reasons why I really started to work seriously. Previously, I had too many interests, not just in physics, but apparently at thirty I became more mature and it was luck, as always you need this. It’s important to properly use your luck, sometimes you have luck but you don’t know that it’s luck.”
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that Miransky’s work has been associated with a Nobel laureate.
Yoichiro Nambu who won the 2008 prize in Physics had also worked with Miransky in symmetry breaking in subatomic physics. “There was a strong overlap between what he did and what I did,” Miransky says. “So I have quite good relations with him and I’m quite happy for him.”