Beyond solid, liquid, gas: Scientists find new state of matter where two exotic materials meet
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Beyond solid, liquid, gas: Scientists find new state of matter where two exotic materials meet")
Representative image. Photograph: (Magnific)
The researchers recorded a sixfold pattern in the electrical conductivity of the material at extremely low temperatures and high magnetic fields, with the effect of weakening along six specific directions.
Physicists at Rutgers University have discovered a quantum state that doesn't fit into solid, liquid, gas, or plasma states. According to a report in Science Advances, the finding emerged not from a single material but from the boundary where two unusual compounds meet.
The study involved combining Eu₂Ir₂O₇ with Dy₂Ti₂O₇. Where Eu₂Ir₂O₇ act as a Weyl semimetal, where electrical conduction occurs through Weyl fermions, an exotic type of particle-like electronic excitation, while Dy₂Ti₂O₇ acts as a magnetic insulator known as spin ice, in which magnetic moments arrange themselves in a pattern similar to how hydrogen atoms form ice.
Both compounds are magnetic pyrochlores and have been studied extensively on their own; however, they had never been examined together until this study, done by first author Tsung-Chi Wu, who completed his doctorate at Rutgers in June.
Kondo coupling
The researchers recorded a sixfold pattern in the electrical conductivity of the material at extremely low temperatures and high magnetic fields, with the effect of weakening along six specific directions. They considered the phenomenon to be Kondo coupling, noting that the shift of the magnetic state of the spin ice alters how electrons spread within the Weyl semimetal's surface, also identified as Fermi-arc states.
As the magnetic field advances further, that sixfold pattern also collapses into a twofold one, calling it a rotational symmetry breaking, pointing to a many-body state driven by interactions among large numbers of particles as compared to individual ones.
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Building the atoms-thick heterostructure required a specially designed instrument, the Q-DiP (Quantum Phenomena Discovery Platform), which was developed by Chakhalian's team following four years of prior experimentation. The bulk of the recent measurements were conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, where extremely low temperatures and powerful magnetic fields enabled the observations to be made.
Meanwhile, Jedediah Pixley's theoretical group, which included postdoctoral researcher Yueqing Chang, spent over two years developing models to interpret the experimental findings. The results indicate that interfaces between different materials can give rise to physics not observed in either material individually—a principle that researchers believe could pave the way for new methods of controlling electronic and magnetic properties.
