Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a novel quantum material, the atomic framework of which has been drastically distorted into a herringbone pattern.

According to Woo Jin Kim, the lead researcher of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC, the distortions resulting from this material are “huge” compared to those in other materials.

“This is a very fundamental result, so it’s hard to make predictions about what may or may not come out of it, but the possibilities are exciting,” said SLAC/Stanford Professor and SIMES Director Harold Hwang.

“Based on theoretical modeling from members of our team, it looks like the new material has intriguing magnetic, orbital, and charge order properties that we plan to investigate further,” he said. Those are some of the very properties that scientists think give quantum materials their surprising characteristics.
The research team described their work in a paper published in the journal Nature.

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