It's not every day that someone comes across a new state of matter in quantum physics, the scientific field devoted to describing the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles in order to elucidate their properties.
Yet this is exactly what an international team of researchers that includes Andrea Bianchi, University of Montreal physics professor and researcher at the Regroupement québécois sur les matériaux de pointe, and his students Avner Fitterman and Jérémi Dudemaine has done.
In a recent article published in the scientific journal Physical Review X, the researchers document a "quantum spin liquid ground state" in a magnetic material created in Bianchi's lab: Ce2Zr2O7, a compound composed of cerium, zirconium and oxygen.
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