Under magnetic fields strong enough to push electrons toward their quantum limits, zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe₅) did something conventional theory says should not happen. Its electrical resistance continued to oscillate even after electrons should have been confined to their lowest available energy level, pointing researchers toward an unusual explanation rooted in the material’s topology.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, come from experiments on the three-dimensional topological insulator at temperatures near absolute zero. Researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Washington, and other U.S. institutions combined electrical transport measurements in magnetic fields reaching 60 tesla with theoretical modeling. The experiments were conducted at about 0.7 kelvin (-272.45 °C).
“This work expands our understanding of electron transport in exotic phases of matter and suggests that topological insulators support the transport of not only electric charge, but also another fundamental degree of freedom: electron spin,” says Julio Larrea Jiménez, a professor at USP’s Physics Institute (IF) and co-founder and director of the Laboratory for Quantum Matter under Extreme Conditions (LQMEC).
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