Playing a different soundtrack is, physically speaking, only a minute change of the vibration spectrum, yet its impact on a dance floor is dramatic. People long for this tiny trigger, and as a salsa changes to a tango completely different collective patterns emerge.
Electrons in metals tend to show only one behavior at zero temperature, when all kinetic energy is quenched. One needs to frustrate the electronic interaction to break the dominance of one particular electronic order and allow multiple possible configurations. Recent results published in Nature Physics on kagome nets suggest that this triangular lattice is quite effective at doing so.
Named after the Japanese bamboo-basket woven pattern, a two-dimensional (2D) kagome lattice is constructed by a series of corner-sharing triangles. When each corner is occupied with magnetic moments with antiferromagnetic correlations, the nearest-neighbor interactions favor anti-aligned spins.
Leave a reply