Topic
Branch of physics studying solids and liquids, focusing on electronic, magnetic, and topological phenomena that underlie modern materials.
Auburn physicists used laser pulses to align polar islands in modified strontium titanate for one picosecond. Light both created and read the pattern, but storing information would need order that outlasts that instant.
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Max Planck physicists used picosecond current pulses to probe a superconductor's depairing limit, a ceiling that DC transport measurements cannot reach. Niobium nitride and a yttrium barium copper oxide material failed differently under the pulses, a contrast the researchers tie to gap symmetry.
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Rice physicists led by Pengcheng Dai find spins in YbMnBi2 favouring some directions from about 400 K, though magnetic order only sets in at 290 K. The team proposes this 'spin nematic' state is why the compound deflects charge and heat currents so strongly in a magnetic field.
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University of Illinois physicists report the first direct evidence that pair density waves in uranium ditelluride persist above its superconducting transition. If that holds, Cooper pairs in this metal form before it superconducts, unlike in conventional superconductors.
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Illinois physicists report the first direct evidence that pair density waves in uranium ditelluride outlive superconductivity, as a 2007 theory predicted. If the result holds, electrons in this metal pair up before superconductivity sets in, though so far the evidence covers only one material.
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University of Toronto physicists say hidden eight-pole magnetic order leaves a handedness in crystal vibrations that light can read. Ordinary probes miss this 'octupolar' state, so researchers can now look for it before anyone tries to build memory from it.
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A scanning tunneling microscope caught electrons inside molybdenum diselenide freezing into a crystal and melting into liquid-like waves, with the defect count in each sample deciding which state held. Quantum Monte Carlo simulations matched the images.
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A Berkeley Lab-led group spent years building a molybdenum diselenide device that a scanning tunneling microscope could read, and it says the defects in that device are what hold the electrons in place.
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In PNAS, Kyle Shen's Cornell group dosed thin films with cesium and measured them without regrowing the sample, and the dome tracked imperfections in the crystal lattice more closely than the electron count.
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Warming a metal's electrons without warming its atoms is hard to arrange. A team at the National University of Singapore managed it in twisted bilayer graphene with 0.14-terahertz light, then read the resistance.
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Screening the Coulomb interaction killed superconductivity in magic-angle graphene outright, which is strong evidence that the electrons do the pairing. It killed the correlated insulators too, narrowing the mechanism debate but not settling it.
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Theory predicted an in-plane anomalous Hall effect and no experiment had shown one, until a few-layer tantalum iridium telluride flake borrowed magnetism from the layer beneath it and produced the signal.
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