We built a "one-way valve" for electricity, proving that electrons can flow just like a swirling liquid.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.16443
The Takeaway
Nikola Tesla once designed a 'one-way' valve for water that used no moving parts. Scientists have now built a version of this for electricity, demonstrating that under the right conditions, electrons stop acting like individual particles and start flowing and swirling like a liquid.
From the abstract
In solids, frequent electron-electron collisions can induse collective, fluid-like electron transport. While this regime offers a powerful framework for exploring many-body phenomena, there is still a lack in functional electronic device actively exploting hydrodynamic behaviour of electrons. Here, we introduce a solid-state analogue of a Tesla valve $\unicode{x2013}$ a passive fluidic diode that rectifies flow without moving parts. Lithographically defined in high-mobility GaAs two-dimensional