Columbia University in New York has developed a different material from silicon. While being pretty good, silicon semiconductors rely on the flow of electrons to transmit data. Still, these particles tend to scatter wildly, wasting energy in heat and slowing the time taken for data to get from A to B.

Top boffin Milan Delor and his chums discovered a faster and more efficient semiconductor in a material with the chemical formula Re6Se8Cl2. It is made of rhenium, selenium and chlorine, but is a superatomic material, in which atoms form clusters yet still act like the original elements.

Particles called excitons move through this material more slowly than electrons do through silicon, but, crucially, they move in arrow-straight lines, so they cover similar distances far more quickly.

If a transistor that uses excitons rather than electrons could be made with this new material, then they would make it from one side of the transistor to the other without scattering, which would allow them to travel from A to B somewhere between 100 and 1000 times faster than electrons in a silicon chip.

Unfortunately, the formular requires a bit of Rhenium which is among the rarest metals on Earth. It does not occur uncombined or as a compound in a mineable mineral species. However, it is widely spread throughout the Earth’s crust to about 0.001 parts per million. Commercial production of rhenium is by extraction from the flue dust of molybdenum smelters.