Graphene – a single layer of carbon atoms from graphite – has displayed a variety of unusual properties, including having effectively massless charged quasiparticles. Igor Zaliznyak of Brookhaven National Laboratory and colleagues have recently shown that if three layers are properly stacked, massive I = 3 chiral quasiparticles appear, with the novel property that their masses depend on energy going to infinity as the energy level decreases.
In the normal world of particle physics such particles would be unstable against decay, but chirality protects these from doing so. They could be the basis for completely novel electronic and spintronic devices.