materials science – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-kind-of-magnetism-spotted-in-an-engineered-material-20240110/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-kind-of-magnetism-spotted-in-an-engineered-material-20240110/#respond Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:33:49 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=133972 The post New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material magnetic? In 1966, the Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka conceived of a type of magnetism produced by a seemingly unnatural dance of electrons within a hypothetical material. Now...

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Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons https://www.quantamagazine.org/meet-strange-metals-where-electricity-may-flow-without-electrons-20231127/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/meet-strange-metals-where-electricity-may-flow-without-electrons-20231127/#respond Mon, 27 Nov 2023 16:22:10 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=132601 The post Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of electric current to pass through. The drips of that current might, Chen hoped, help settle a persistent mystery about how charge moves through a bewildering class of materials known as strange metals. Chen...

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Invisible ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor https://www.quantamagazine.org/invisible-electron-demon-discovered-in-odd-superconductor-20231009/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/invisible-electron-demon-discovered-in-odd-superconductor-20231009/#respond Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:05:34 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=131121 The post Invisible ‘Demon’ Discovered in Odd Superconductor first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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In 1956, David Pines formulated a phantom. He predicted the existence of seas of electric ripples that could neutralize each other, rendering the overall ocean motionless even as individual waves ebbed and flowed. The oddity, which came to be known as Pines’ demon, would be electrically neutral, and therefore invisible to light — the definition of tough to detect. Over the decades...

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Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-who-explored-tiny-glimpses-of-time-win-nobel-prize-20231003/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-who-explored-tiny-glimpses-of-time-win-nobel-prize-20231003/#respond Tue, 03 Oct 2023 10:00:03 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=130775 The post Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales. Between the 1980s and the early 2000s...

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The Simple Geometry That Predicts Molecular Mosaics https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-simple-geometry-that-predicts-molecular-mosaics-20230621/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-simple-geometry-that-predicts-molecular-mosaics-20230621/#respond Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:01:49 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=127014 The post The Simple Geometry That Predicts Molecular Mosaics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and the Natural Geometry of Fragmentation.” It wasn’t the unusual title that caught his eye, but the pictures on the third page — geological patterns at every scale from cracked permafrost to Earth’s...

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