Physicists watch a material’s electrons assemble, and reassemble, into coexisting phases
A tall glass of ice water isn’t just a thirst quencher; it’s also an everyday example of coexisting phases.
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A new study by MIT physicists sheds light on how two different phases of electron behavior can emerge and coexist in the same quantum material.
Their results, reported today in the journal Nature Physics , can help to explain how some materials host superconductivity, magnetism, and other electronic phases. Untangling such phases, and understanding how they emerge, will help engineers control electronic behavior and design high-performance quantum devices.
“People believe the cornerstone of replacing silicon lies in quantum materials that have multiple coexisting phases,” says co-author Alfred Zong PhD ’20, who co-led the study as an MIT graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Stanford University. “Our experiment provides a very neat way to study these multiple phases.”
The team, led by Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT, studied the rare-earth material erbium tritelluride. As with most materials, erbium tritelluride’s electrons are normally scattered uniformly throughout the material. But when cooled to certain temperatures, the electrons suddenly organize into a wave-like pattern, which physicists term a “charge density wave” (CDW) phase. When cooled even further, electrons coordinate again as a second wavy phase that criss-crosses the first. The effect is of an atomic checkerboard of co-existing electron phases.