Field note

Grain boundaries as candidate state

The field desk · 12 August 2026

Polysilicon is silicon grown or cast as many crystals rather than one. Where two crystals meet, the lattice does not line up. Those grain boundaries trap electrons and holes. The traps are ordinary solid-state physics. Solar cells and some transistor gates are measured against them all the time.

This journal asks a narrower question than the title suggests. If a pattern of trapped charge can persist, change, and be reset, what is the most honest description of that pattern? Memory is a laboratory word. Consciousness is not. The second word stays in the title so the claim remains visible, and so it can be retired if the measurements never earn it.

A boundary that holds charge is not a subject. It does not report experience. What it can do is hold a state that a later readout may disturb. The work this season is to write down which observations would count as state, which are only leakage, and which are metaphors that should be dropped.