Tacc Podcasts

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. If you hold one wire mesh on top of another one and look through it, you'll see a larger pattern called a moiré pattern formed by the overlapping grids of the two meshes, which depends on their relative twisted angle. Scientists developing new materials are actively studying moiré patterns in overlapping atomically thin materials — they produce intriguing electronic phenomena that includes unconventional superconductivity and ferromagnetism. Supercomputer simulations have helped scientists reveal in a bilayer moiré system a new species of an electronic phenomenon called an exciton, which is an electrically neutral quasiparticle, yet one that can carry energy and consists of an electron and electron ‘hole' that can be created for example by ligh