New Theory About Another Universe Arises From Experiments on Graphene

The authors of a new study theorise that physics observed in two stacked sheets of graphene may be "reinterpreted as the physics of two two-dimensional universes where electrons occasionally hop between universes".

The results of a study conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland may hint at the prospects of the existence of another universe.

According to a press release published on the university’s website, Joint Quantum Institute Fellow Victor Galitski and graduate student Alireza Parhizkar came up with a model where our reality is only one half of two interacting worlds, while looking into experiments with sheets of graphene.

Seeing the patterns that emerge when electricity moves through stacked sheets of graphene, the researchers theorised that, just as "new electrical behaviors arise from interactions between the individual sheets", perhaps "unique physics could similarly emerge from interacting layers elsewhere".

"In a sense, it's almost suspicious that it works so well by naturally ‘predicting’ fundamental features of our universe such as inflation and the Higgs particle as we described in a follow up preprint", Galitski said.

The duo postulated that the physics in two sheets of the material in question may be "reinterpreted as the physics of two two-dimensional universes where electrons occasionally hop between universes", so the researchers moved to "generalize the math to apply to universes made of any number of dimensions", the press release notes.

"We haven't explored all the effects—that's a hard thing to do, but the theory is falsifiable experimentally, which is a good thing", Parhizkar said.