Writing in Science, a team of chemists at Columbia University have described a superatomic material - Re6Se8Cl2 - that is the fastest and most efficient semiconductor currently known. The key to its speed? The way in which information - and computation - can be carried through. So when researchers say they've found "the world's best semiconductor material" - one to take silicon's place as the Atlas of our virtualities - we must take notice.
Silicon (Si) is one of the most interesting elements listed in the periodic table. Silicon exists almost everywhere an Integrated Circuit (IC) exists; without it, we'd lose everything virtual about our world, alongside most of the tools we use to understand and operate on it. Silicon matters.
In contrast, Re6Se8Cl2 is a synthetic superatomic material: you can't find it anywhere in the wild. Being superatomic simply means that the atomic elements within Re6Se8Cl2 behave like one big atom but actually manifest properties that are more than the sum of its elementary parts. Re6Se8Cl2 was manufactured in the lab of one of the paper's collaborators, Xavier Roy.
