Two thin sheets with honeycomb patterns were stacked and slightly rotated, creating a new pattern — a moiré, like the shimmer of silk. The electrons in the experiment behaved similarly: they arranged themselves into two layers, with one layer rotated exactly 30 degrees relative to the other.
Previously, it was thought that under such conditions electrons would freeze into a simple honeycomb lattice, like bees in a hive. But calculations showed that it's precisely the trembling that rearranges the whole structure. It destroys the simple order and forces particles to seek a new, more stable position — with a twist. Thus, an electronic quasicrystal is born.
This result changes our view of how ordered structure can emerge from chaos. In the future, it may guide the creation of materials with unusual properties — for instance, conductors that conduct electricity differently in different directions.
as written by the authors arXiv:2605.06302
The strongly correlated phases of the homogeneous electron gas constitute the vocabulary of many-body condensed matter physics and find a natural realization in semiconductors. In this setting, recent neural-network variational Monte Carlo calculations discovered an unexpected quantum phase of matter in wide quantum wells: an electronic quasicrystal formed by a bilayer Wigner crystals with a 30-degrees twist. This state defies classical expectations and emerges in a regime dominated by quantum fluctuations. Here, we develop an analytical framework to reveal its origin. By computing zero-point energy corrections to bilayer Wigner crystal configurations, we show that quantum fluctuations qualitatively reshape the energetic landscape, destabilizing the classical honeycomb state and selecting the 30-degrees quasicrystalline ground state over a broad parameter range. Our results identify zero-point motion as the mechanism stabilizing the electronic quasicrystal and establish a route to spontaneous moir\'e physics driven by many-body quantum effects.
The 30-degree rotation is the only angle at which two identical layers with a hexagonal lattice create a pattern that never repeats. It's like the tiling with two types of rhombi discovered by mathematician Roger Penrose.
In Neal Stephenson's novel 'Anathem', quantum computers run on crystals that change their properties upon mere observation — much like these electron layers, sensitive to the slightest jitter.