The electronics industry expects a novel high-performance transistor made of gallium nitride to offer considerable advantages over present-day high-frequency transistors. Yet many fundamental properties of the material remain unknown. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have observed electrons while they were flowing in this promising transistor. For that they used the world’s top-performing source of soft X-rays at PSI’s Swiss Light Source SLS. This unique experiment was conducted by PSI researchers together with colleagues from Russia and Romania. Their finding: When going into the high power regime of the gallium nitride transistor, in specific directions the electrons move more efficiently. This insight will help to develop faster and more powerful transistors – a prerequisite for converting our communication network to the coming 5G standard. The researchers have now published their results in the journal Nature Communications.