Most of us are familiar with the existing states of matter. Under normal conditions, matter can either be solid, liquid, or gas. Going beyond the normal situations, however, things can look very different as the temperatures approach absolute zero. At this point, objects that are smaller than a fraction of an atom or those with low states of energy behave in a way that are more extreme than those of the three classical states.
A group of experts headed by assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan of University of Massachusetts performed an experiment that led them to the discovery of a new state of matter. They developed a frustration machine in the form of a bilayer semiconducting device. It contains an electron-rich top layer where the elections can freely move, while the bottom layer are full of holes that can be occupied by roving electrons. These two layers are positioned extremely close to each other in a degree known as interatomic close.
The particles are expected to act in a correlated manner if there is an equal number of electrons in the top layer and holes in the bottom layer. In this experiment, Sedrakyan and his team decided to design the bottom layer in such a way that the number of electrons and the holes in the bottom layer achieve a local imbalance. This is intended to frustrate the electrons as they scramble to look for holes to pass through.
The resulting frustration level triggers the novel chiral edge state which was found to have unusual properties. For instance, cooling quantum matter in a chiral state up to absolute zero degree will freeze the electrons in a predictable way. The arising charge-neutral particles in this state will spin either in a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction. Breaking another particle into one of these electrons or introducing a magnetic field cannot change this spin.
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