I’m about to show you the most  beautiful element on the periodic table.

Behold! Bismuth!

Atomic number 83. Technically radioactive, but it breaks  down so slowly that our universe would have to be a billion times  older for you to really notice. It’s so safe you can eat it.

I mean, not, like, this chunk of crystal. But bismuth is a critical ingredient in  medications you take to ease symptoms like nausea, heartburn, indigestion ... It puts the “bis” in  Pepto-Bismol is what I’m saying.

And recently, one team of scientists  identified another application for bismuth. It could bring about a mini  revolution in electronics. You’ve just gotta take a microscopic  cheese grater to it, first. [♪ INTRO] Some elements start displaying  some funky properties when you get small enough pieces of them.

One of the most famous examples  is carbon, which you can turn into a one atom-thick layer of graphene  that’s 200 times stronger than steel. A team of researchers in Canada  was interested in exploring what unusual properties they might uncover  by getting bismuth as thin as possible. To do that, they’d take a small crystal,  stick it on the end of a metal rod, and rub it against a plane of microscopic  ridges to shave the flakes they needed.

This was kind of a revelation, because  previous research required super fancy tech to get pieces of bismuth this small. Now labs all over the world,  without access to that equipment, can join in on the research with  what’s basically a cheese grater! To understand what the team found when  they studied these super thin flakes, we first have to understand an electromagnetic  phenomenon called the Hall Effect.

Way back in 1879, a man named  Edwin Hall was playing with wires, magnets, and thin sheets of gold leaf. He found that when he had a current  flowing through the length of a conductor, and he moved that conductor inside  a magnetic field the right way, a voltage would appear across its width. Which is perpendicular to the voltage  you learn about in high school physics.

Here’s what’s happening: A flowing  current means that electrons are moving down the length of the conductor. Generally, straight down it. But the external magnetic field  created by the magnet exerts a force on those electrons, and  causes the path they take to bend.

They wind up shifting toward  one of the conductor’s sides. Electrons are negatively charged,  so that side of the conductor builds up a negative charge. But that movement also means a positive  charge builds up on the opposite side.

So across the width of the conductor, you get what’s called a potential  difference, a.k.a. a voltage. The more powerful the external magnetic  field, the larger that voltage. This is the part of the Hall  Effect you wind up measuring.

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Generally, when either a magnet or the  conductor was moving relative to the other. The Hall Effect has been used  in all sorts of applications, from anti-lock braking systems in cars, to joysticks for video game console controllers. Which is all well and good, but  it isn’t the only Hall Effect.

If you get bismuth flakes thin enough, they become a great demo for what’s  called the Anomalous Hall Effect. Because as it turns out, the  Hall Effect can also show up when a current is flowing  through magnetic materials, even when there’s no external magnet! These materials can basically compensate by generating their own internal magnetic field.

Why it happens is still  being debated by physicists, but one theory has to do with how  the conductor’s atoms are arranged, and how that arrangement bends electrons in a certain direction as they pass through. But there’s a pretty important  wrinkle in this story: Bismuth isn’t magnetic. It’s got  no business having this effect.

It’s not the only nonmagnetic material  that seems to display the Anomalous Hall Effect, but bismuth is extra weird  because of how persistent the effect is. The researchers looked at the bismuth  flakes across a wide range of temperatures, from just above the coldest  possible temperature ever, 0 Kelvin, up to a warm room  temperature of 300 Kelvin. And bismuth’s Anomalous Hall Effect didn’t  vanish at those warmer temperatures.

The researchers don’t know why this is happening, but they do have a working hypothesis. It goes back to that idea that the atoms  are arranged in a very particular way. Bismuth might not be magnetic, but  its structure winds up manifesting something that acts like  an internal magnetic field, without actually being an internal magnetic field.

This property is called a Berry Curvature. Now, for a lump of bismuth,  you probably won’t observe a Berry Curvature anywhere except its surface. But if you slice that lump into  something super duper thin… like dozens of nanometers thin… you do create something  that’s kind of all surface.

Whatever is causing these bismuth  flakes to have an Anomalous Hall Effect, it opens up new possibilities  for physics and electronics. Scientists could use bismuth to  study the even weirder phenomenon of the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect. Normally it only manifests at  temperatures below 1 Kelvin, but if bismuth is rocking a weirdly  stable anomalous hall effect at room temperature, it could  mean the quantum version is more visible at warmer temperatures, too.

Any knowledge gleaned from that  research…and maybe bismuth itself… could find its way into quantum computers. Meanwhile, bismuth's regular  anomalous hall effect could be used for some electronics in  day-to-day life where…once again… temperatures are a lot warmer than the ones you need for other materials  to display the same effect. And remember the Pepto Bismol of it all?

Bismuth is a non-toxic metal. And many of the metals we use in electronics for their quantum properties are…not. Combine that with how easy it seems  to be to make decent bismuth flakes, and subbing in bismuth could help make parts of the industry cheaper and less toxic.

This is still very early days for  this research, so in the meantime, I'll just sit here and admire  my much bigger bismuth chunks. And try not to eat them. [♪ OUTRO]