Rhenium demand just exploded

Columbia University's quantum initiative has introduced Re₆Se₈Cl₂. This is a silicon-free semiconductor; useful for circuits and - although the research doesn't say this - solar panels.

Here we get to learn about the existence of "superatoms", and dig further into the wonderful world of quasi-particles. Any lattice over absolute zero vibrates. The vibration emits "quantum particles", phonons. Then they affect electrons, and the lack-of-electron (the quasi-p) here called an exciton. When an exciton and an acoustic-phonon love each other very much, thus ensues a new quasi-p: acoustic exciton-polaron. These flow without scatter.

Excitons - which are just electrons moving off the gaps - are fast in silicon, slow in Re₆Se₈Cl₂. That slowness turns out to be good, here; its excitons "pace themselves". Acoustic phonons haven't gotten any faster, so the excitons meet them more efficiently. The electrons move twice as fast overall than in silicon, and lose less heat.

In theory processing speeds in theoretical devices have the potential to reach femtoseconds—six orders of magnitude faster than the nanoseconds achievable in current Gigahertz electronics. That is still brute-force processing, not quantum computing; but not all calculations need be quantum. Also Columbia haven't got there... yet.

Columbia only found this as a byproduct, of a high-res motion-capture microscope they're working on. This microscope will make that university a hot place for similar semiconductor research.

Which research, the team admit, they might need. There's good reason this super duper atom won't be wasted on solar: the "Re" stands for rhenium. We don't own a lot of rhenium on Earth.

But for the moment, this product seems like a spectacular macguffinite for getting up to 2-4 AU, to nose about iron-rich asteroids.