As electronics shrink, current gets squirrely
Electrical current may be drastically reduced when wires from two dissimilar metals meet, research shows.
“You could use the analogy of a water hose,” says Peter Grütter, a physics professor at McGill University. “If you keep the water pressure constant, less water comes out as you reduce the diameter of the hose.”
“But if you were to shrink the hose to the size of a straw just two or three atoms in diameter, the outflow would no longer decline at a rate proportional to the hose cross-sectional area; it would vary in a quantized (‘jumpy’) way.”
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