{"id":496792,"date":"2026-06-12T22:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/496792\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T22:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:42:08","slug":"since-1987-covering-the-fastest-computers-in-the-world-and-the-people-who-run-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/496792\/","title":{"rendered":"Since 1987 \u2013 Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 12, 2026 \u2014\u00a0To design the next generation of smaller, more powerful electronic devices, scientists will need to understand better how the materials act at the smallest scales. In moir\u00e9 superlattices, scientists lay sheets of identical or similar materials just an atom thick atop each other. These materials may promise finely tuned electronic behaviors at tiny distances. But their behavior doesn\u2019t always match with existing theory. A team from Florida State University<\/a> used PSC<\/a>\u2019s NSF-funded Bridges-2 to explore how a type of matter on a triangular moir\u00e9 superlattice behaves, suggesting how scientists can improve their theory and supplying a new tool for materials engineers to use in designing devices.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bridges-2<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s M3 Ultra computer chip, which powers the latest iPhones and iMacs, contains 184 billion transistors. The tiny \u201cmetal lines\u201d that carry electrons through the device can be as close together as 24 nanometers \u2014 about a millionth of an inch. At that scale, the weird rules of quantum mechanics, by which electrons are waves and can jump across otherwise \u201csolid\u201d barriers, take over.<\/p>\n

As our electronics get smaller, it gets harder to determine how they\u2019ll behave. Knocking together components and seeing what happens isn\u2019t economical or effective. Instead, you first need to figure out how materials work at the most basic level.<\/p>\n

Such basic science doesn\u2019t always create new devices. But it gives the designers the rules they need to figure new devices out.<\/p>\n

One set of materials that scientists would like to understand better are moir\u00e9 superlattices. These materials offer enhanced tunability, because it may be possible to design them to control movement of electrons across their structure \u2014 what computer scientists call \u201cgate voltages.\u201d One particular moir\u00e9 system has two sheets of slightly mismatched materials called transition metal dichalcogenides, each only an atom thick.<\/p>\n

The mismatch pattern creates a large moir\u00e9 unit cell. These larger structures in the material reduce the energy scales of the layers by as much as a thousand times. This allows scientists to study behaviors at energy scales that would simply not be accessible for conventional materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are interested in modeling electronic phases of matter, which are distinct from the structural phases we know from everyday life \u2014 you know, solid, liquid, gas,\u201d said Hitesh Changlani, FSU and Maglab. \u201cBut the electrons, which you do not see with your bare eyes, have a world of their own and can transform from one phase to another \u2026 A lot of our work is motivated by the ability to predict and to understand: What do electrons do in different situations?\u201d<\/p>\n

Aman Kumar, a Dirac postdoctoral fellow at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Maglab), working with Florida State University\u2019s Hitesh Changlani and Cyprian Lewandowski, wanted to better understand a kind of triangular moir\u00e9 superlattice formed by the electrons in a\u00a0Wigner crystal. A crucial tool in their investigation was PSC\u2019s flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer.<\/p>\n

In quantum mechanics, electrons don\u2019t behave as particles. Instead, they are waves, typically spreading out and delocalizing. Everyday metals, such as copper and aluminum, conduct electricity because the electrons, despite having the same negative charge, are spread out farther apart in a kind of soup, and so don\u2019t repel each other as strongly.<\/p>\n

A moir\u00e9 superlattice greatly suppresses that kind of electron delocalization. At certain densities, electrons suddenly \u201csee\u201d each other\u2019s charge, and freeze in place. Instead of being a conductor like a metal, they are now an insulator, blocking electrical current. This behavior could allow engineers to tune the crystal by altering the density through changing the gate voltage, or by varying twist angles.<\/p>\n

When scientists built real Wigner crystals in the lab, though, the frozen electrons\u00a0melted\u00a0at a lower temperature than classical theory had predicted. Also, two forms of Wigner crystals, with triangular versus honeycomb arrangements of atoms, showed different melting points, when the theory said they should be the same. The quantum rules were making themselves felt.<\/p>\n

To understand how the system worked, Kumar would need to simulate the electrons in the Wigner crystal using the rules of quantum statistical mechanics. Each theoretical model would require dealing with matrices that have about 100 million dimensions, using hundreds of different starting points and then averaging them. To avoid slowdowns in the calculations as the computer went back and forth from data storage to its computing nodes, the system would need to store a considerable amount of memory in its RAM.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you are in the low temperature phase, you have this nice, ordered pattern of electrons,\u201d said Kumar. \u201cThat is the Wigner crystal. When you are in the high-temperature phase, the crystal has melted. So, to understand this melting transition, and to locate where this transition was happening and compare it with experiments, we need to restart this algorithm many, many times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bridges-2 proved ideal for the work, with regular nodes containing either 256 or 512 gigabytes of memory. That\u2019s four to eight times as much RAM as in a hot laptop computer. And Bridges-2 has 504 of these nodes.<\/p>\n

The simulations helped explain the melting behavior of the triangular and honeycomb Wigner crystals. The simulations also showed how and when the quantum behavior started showing up. Importantly, the results suggest that Wigner crystals naturally exist at a point very close to the metal-insulator transition.\u00a0That\u2019s the point at which the electrons switch between carrying electrical currents and blocking them. This means that small changes in the crystals can produce large changes in behavior, which could prove useful to materials engineers.\u00a0The team reported their results in the journal\u00a0npj Quantum Materials\u00a0in August 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The team is currently exploring the effects of two factors for controlling the Wigner crystals\u2019 behavior \u2014 the temperature and the electron kinetic energy\/bandwidth. Just as importantly, Kumar\u2019s work has provided a new tool for the group to continue studying Wigner crystals in moir\u00e9 superlattices, at other electron densities where patterns such as stripes have been realized. The computer models make predictions on how these materials will behave, which lab scientists can use to study them in the real world.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a>: Ken Chiacchia, PSC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"June 12, 2026 \u2014\u00a0To design the next generation of smaller, more powerful electronic devices, scientists will need to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-496792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}