Condensed Matter & Superconductors

1+ hour, 10+ min ago   (980+ words) Superconductivity occurs when a metal can carry electricity with zero resistance after being cooled below a critical temperature. In this state, the material's free electrons settle into a low-energy quantum state. That creates a fundamental challenge. Electrons belong to a…...

3+ hour, 16+ min ago   (209+ words) What is X-ray diffraction? A closer, clearer look Replacing two older systems, the Bruker D8 Discover Plus introduces the latest in X-ray diffraction technology to MIT.nano, along with several major upgrades for the Characterization.nano facility. One key feature is…...

4+ hour, 28+ min ago   (754+ words) Awardees include Professor Frances Ross; Professor Vladan Vuletić, graduate student Jiliang Hu ’19, PhD ’24; as well as 10 alumni. New APS Fellows include Professor Joseph Checkelsky, Senior Researcher John Chiaverini, Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian, Professor Ruben Juanes, and seven alumni. Frances M....

8+ hour, 47+ min ago   (457+ words) For decades, physicists building quantum memories out of rare-earth crystals accepted a fundamental constraint: pack the crystal with ions to absorb light efficiently, or keep them sparse to preserve the delicate quantum coherence needed to store information. A paper published…...

4+ hour, 44+ min ago   (725+ words) To explain why he loves electron microscopy, Associate Professor James LeBeau uses an analogy: He likens the technique, which uses beams of electrons to illuminate materials at a scale thousands of times smaller than conventional microscopes, to the inverse of…...

4+ hour, 44+ min ago   (373+ words) Delivered on Nov. 22, Jarillo-Herrero’s lecture introduced a combined in-person and virtual audience of over 200 to magic-angle graphene, the rise of moiré quantum matter, and what comes next, with a bit of inspiration from the late MIT Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus....

4+ hour, 45+ min ago   (547+ words) To pay enduring tribute to MIT Institute Professor Dresselhaus and her extraordinary impact on MIT and the broader scientific community, MIT.nano has established the Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lectures. Cornell University's Paul McEuen will deliver the first lecture. Centers, Labs, & Programs…...

5+ hour, 44+ min ago   (210+ words) A research team led by the University of Osaka has directly observed an unusual heavy-fermion state forming at the boundary between a one-atom-thick material and a metal for the first time. Such states are closely linked to exotic quantum phenomena,…...

6+ hour, 1+ min ago   (258+ words) The new technique is not limited to Weyl semimetals. “We can use this method for any inorganic bulk material, and for thin films as well,” maintains NSE postdoc Manasi Mandal, one of two lead authors of an open-access paper — published…...

9+ hour, 32+ min ago   (484+ words) The central unanswered question was always: what is the starting point? What is the electron phase from which all of this exotic behavior descends? The experimental challenge is immediate. In pure CsV₃Sb₅, the charge density wave transition at 94 K (−290°F) obscures…...