Mobile-phone chargers and other devices could become much smaller after an all-RIKEN team of physicists successfully shrunk an electrical component known as an inductor to microscale dimensions using a quantum effect. …
Tag: Superconductivity Quantum Physics
Ultra-thin designer materials unlock quantum phenomena
A team of theoretical and experimental physicists have designed a new ultra-thin material that they have used to create elusive quantum states. Called one-dimensional Majorana zero energy modes, these quantum states could have a huge impact for quantum computing. …
The Hall effect links superconductivity and quantum criticality in a strange metal
Over the past few decades, researchers have identified a number of superconducting materials with atypical properties, known as unconventional superconductors. Many of these superconductors share the same anomalous charge transport properties and are thus collectively characterized as “strange metals.” …
New evidence for quantum fluctuations near a quantum critical point in a superconductor
Among all the curious states of matter that can coexist in a quantum material, jostling for preeminence as temperature, electron density and other factors change, some scientists think a particularly weird juxtaposition exists at a single intersection of factors, called the quantum critical point or QCP. …
A ‘breath of nothing’ provides a new perspective on superconductivity
Zero electrical resistance at room temperature? A material with this property, i.e. a room temperature superconductor, could revolutionize power distribution. But so far, the origin of superconductivity at high temperature is only incompletely understood. Scientists from Universität Hamburg and the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” have succeeded in observing strong evidence of superfluidity in a central model system,…
Interfaces the key in atomically-thin, ‘high-temperature’ superconductors
An international FLEET collaboration publishing a review of atomically-thin ‘high temperature’ superconductors finds that each has a common driving mechanism: interfaces. …
‘Tantalizing’ clues about why a mysterious material switches from conductor to insulator
Tantalum disulfide is a mysterious material. According to textbook theory, it should be a conducting metal, but in the real world, it acts like an insulator. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have taken a high-resolution look at the structure of the material, revealing why it demonstrates this unintuitive behavior. …
Scientists find another clue to explain unconventional superconductivity
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have successfully performed measurements of an iron-based superconductor in an important but difficult-to-reach regime where critical quantum fluctuations dominate the physics. Using a new sensing technique, they accurately mapped quantum phase transition—a phenomenon that is theorized to be closely coupled to superconductivity—deep inside the superconducting state. …
Imaging nematic transitions in iron pnictide superconductors
Researchers at Stanford University have recently carried out an in-depth study of nematic transitions in iron pnictide superconductors. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, presents new imaging data of these transitions collected using a microscope they invented, dubbed the scanning quantum cryogenic atom microscope (SQCRAMscope). …
Building block for quantum computers more common than previously believed
Advanced, fault-tolerant quantum computers may be closer to reach than scientists have projected, according to recent advances reported by Johns Hopkins researchers in a new study recently published in Physical Review Letters. …