Image: This illustration depicts a herringbone-like pattern in the atomic lattice of a quantum material created by researchers at SLAC and Stanford. An electronic tug-of-war between its layers has dramatically warped the lattice. Researchers are just staring to explore how this ‘huge’ distortion affects the material’s properties.
Source: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences news feature
Researchers have created a new type of quantum material(opens in new tab) whose atomic scaffolding, or lattice, has been dramatically warped into a herringbone pattern, described in a paper(opens in new tab) published today in Nature.
The resulting distortions are “huge” compared to those achieved in other materials, said Woo Jin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES(opens in new tab)) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who led the study.
Chunjing Jia, one of the paper’s authors, left Stanford last year to join the faculty as assistant professor in the Physics Department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.