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    "headline": "Regensburg physicists film electrons jumping a forbidden gap in graphene; up to 100% made the leap",
    "description": "University of Regensburg physicists filmed electrons in graphene jumping across a forbidden energy gap, with up to 100 percent making the leap.",
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    "keywords": "graphene, Quantum physics, Rupert Huber, University of Regensburg",
    "articleBody": "Electrons in graphene leapt straight across a forbidden energy gap with a probability of up to 100 percent, physicists at the University of Regensburg in Germany report, after filming the jumps frame by frame inside a single oscillation of a light wave. The team, working with Philipps-Universität Marburg and Forschungszentrum Jülich, published the result in Nature in late October 2026 under the title “Subcycle videography of Landau-Zener-Majorana transitions in graphene.” Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. The university’s own comparison is an elevator. You press the button, the display reads 1, 2, 3, and then suddenly 20. You never passed floors 4 to 19, yet you are standing on the twentieth. Electrons in a solid are normally stuck in fixed energy ranges called bands, separated by a gap they are not allowed to occupy. In this experiment they crossed that gap anyway. A jump first described in 1932 The effect has a long pedigree. Lev Landau, Clarence Zener, Ernst Stueckelberg and Ettore Majorana each worked out the math for it independently in 1932, according to the Landau–Zener formula entry. Their result says a quantum system pushed fast enough past two nearly touching energy levels can switch from one to the other instead of staying put. Push slowly and nothing happens; push fast and the odds of a jump climb. That is the key difference from ordinary quantum tunneling, where a particle slips through a physical barrier in space. Here the barrier is a gap in energy, and the deciding factor is speed. The Regensburg release says the transitions can happen with high probability even when the two energy states are clearly separated. Putting it in numbers: the theory dates to 1932, and the first direct video of it in a solid has come 94 years later. How the Regensburg team filmed it The group paired very strong, very fast oscillating light fields with a photoemission momentum microscope. Unlike a normal microscope, this instrument does not magnify an object. It records the energy and direction of motion of electrons and turns them into a map. First author Vincent Eggers compared the approach to sports timing. “If you want to know who has won a race, you have watch all participants,” he said in the university release. The point was to watch as many electrons as possible at once, so the few that made a jump would be caught. The samples mattered. Researchers at Jülich made ultra-pure, atomically thin carbon layers, including a “rotated” form of graphene that Jülich physicist Stefan Tautz said lets the quantum effects show up more clearly. Physicist Rupert Huber said the group had spent “many years” building the experiment. What one experiment can and cannot show This is a single study in one material, and the strength of the evidence should be read that way. The headline figure of up to 100 percent is a maximum under strong light fields, not a typical rate. The measurements also showed that collisions with the vibrating carbon lattice quickly scramble the electrons’ orderly motion, which is exactly the kind of loss engineers would need to beat. The payoff the team describes is long-range. Researchers have suspected for years that these jumps will matter in very fast semiconductor electronics, where chips might one day be switched by the oscillations of light rather than by voltage alone. Nothing in the paper is a working device. The same Regensburg lab has been busy: earlier this month a separate group there reported a limit on how precisely an electron can be pinned down in both space and time. For more on where quantum hardware stands today, see our report on IBM’s plan to link two Nighthawk quantum chips into a 1,040-qubit system, and our story on atoms chilled to 9.7 picokelvin aboard China’s Tiangong station. Giacomo Inzani, a Regensburg co-author, said the method can be pointed at “many other quantum materials.” The next measurements will test whether the same jumps can be steered on demand in those materials, using light alone. Further reading Wikipedia: Landau–Zener formula Nature (2026): Subcycle videography of Landau-Zener-Majorana transitions in graphene Image: Ququ, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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