Lifeboat Foundation

For nearly 40 years, materials called ‘strange metals’ have flummoxed quantum physicists, defying explanation by operating outside the normal rules of electricity.

Now research led by Aavishkar Patel of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City has identified, at long last, a mechanism that explains the characteristic properties of strange metals.

In the August 18 issue of Science, Patel and his colleagues present their universal theory of why strange metals are so weird—a solution to one of the greatest unsolved problems in condensed matter physics.