Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has won the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for 'discoveries concerning the 'magic angle' that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled.' He shares the 400,000-euro award with Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin. According to the BBVA Foundation, 'the pioneering work of the two physicists has achieved both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating new two-dimensional materials like graphene.' Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. In a theoretical model published in 2011, MacDonald predicted that on twisting two graphene layers at a given angle, of around 1 degree, the interaction of electrons would produce new emerging properties. In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero...
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