November 5, 2013 – Using a scanning tunneling microscope tip, scientists at the University of Rostock, Germany, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have accomplished something thought to be virtually impossible. “We devised an approach to change electronic properties of one-dimensional systems without introducing dopant atoms that effectively cut the chain into smaller pieces,” said Paul Snijders of ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division. This discovery, known as transient doping and detailed in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, was accomplished using only electrons. That makes it especially intriguing to co-author Snijders and colleagues who note that the doping of materials, which changes the number of electrons, has led to significant – and often unexpected – discoveries of colossal magnetoresistance and unconventional superconductivity. The paper is available at http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.156801
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