solid state physics – Quanta Magazine

New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material

Michael Greshko — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:33:49 +0000

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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Graphene Superconductors May Be Less Exotic Than Physicists Hoped

Charlie Wood — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:00:41 +0000

Three years ago, physicists discovered that two stacked sheets of carbon with a tiny, 1.1-degree twist between them could exhibit a dazzling array of behaviors. Most famously, when cooled to low temperatures, the material conducts electricity with zero resistance. Researchers raced to figure out why twisted bilayer graphene (as it’s called) becomes a superconductor, with a form of...

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A New Twist Reveals Superconductivity’s Secrets

Charlie Wood — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 16:20:35 +0000

For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists. The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced the find of the decade: When the researchers stacked one flat sheet of carbon atoms on top of another, applied a “magic” 1.1-degree twist between them, then cooled the atomic wafers to nearly absolute zero, the sample became a perfect conduit of electrons.

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With a Simple Twist, a ‘Magic’ Material Is Now the Big Thing in Physics

David H. Freedman — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 16:50:31 +0000

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is channeling some of his copious energy into a morning run, dodging startled pedestrians as he zips along, gradually disappearing into the distance. He’d doubtlessly be moving even faster if he weren’t dressed in a sports coat, slacks and dress shoes, and confined to one of the many weirdly long corridors that crisscross the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of...

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A Child’s Puzzle Has Helped Unlock the Secrets of Magnetism

Marcus Woo — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:55:44 +0000

For a few months in 1880, entire swaths of the United States succumbed to an addiction the likes of which had never been seen. “It has become literally an epidemic all over the country,” wrote The Weekly News-Democrat in Emporia, Kansas, on March 12, 1880. “Whole cities are distracted, and men are losing sleep and going crazy over it.” The epidemic spread to Europe and as far as Australia and New...

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