An ultrapure material taken to pressures greater than that in the depths of the ocean and chilled to temperatures colder than outer space has revealed an unexpected phase transition that crosses two different phase categories.
A Purdue University-led team of researchers observed electrons transition from a topologically ordered phase to a broken symmetry phase.
"To our knowledge, a transition across the two groups of phases had not been unambiguously demonstrated before, and existing theories cannot describe it," said Gábor Csáthy, an associate professor in Purdue's Department of Physics and Astronomy who led the research. "It is something like changing water from liquid to ice; except the two phases we saw were very different from one another."
A paper detailing the results of the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation-funded research will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature Physics and is currently available online.
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