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Human-AI teamwork uncovers hidden magnetic states in quantum spin liquids

At the forefront of discovery, where cutting-edge scientific questions are tackled, we often don’t have much data. Conversely, successful machine learning (ML) tends to rely on large, high-quality data sets for training. So how can researchers harness AI effectively to support their investigations?

In Physical Review Research, scientists describe an approach for working with ML to tackle complex questions in condensed matter physics. Their method tackles hard problems which were previously unsolvable by physicist simulations or by ML algorithms alone.

The researchers were interested in frustrated magnets— in which competing interactions lead to exotic magnetic properties. Studying these materials has helped to advance our understanding of quantum computing and shed light on . However, frustrated magnets are very difficult to simulate, because of the constraints arising from the way magnetic ions interact.

Study sheds light on how inherited cancer mutations drive tumor growth

Most cancer genome studies have focused on mutations in the tumor itself and how such gene variants allow a tumor to grow unchecked. A new study, led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, takes a deep dive into inherited cancer mutations measured in a healthy blood sample and reports how those mutations might take a toll on the body’s cells starting at birth, perhaps predisposing a person to develop cancers at various stages of life.

The authors analyzed the inherited genomes of more than 1,000 cancer patients and determined how inherited mutations — also known as germline variants — result in malfunctioning proteins, which in turn can impair physiological activities. The findings have implications for determining an individual’s inherited cancer risk and informing potential new strategies for prevention, early detection and treatment.

The study appears April 14 in the journal Cell.

Findings could help predict cancer risk over a person’s lifetime, develop prevention strategies.

Scientists repurpose old solar panels to convert CO₂ exhaust into valuable chemicals

Centuries ago, alchemists worked furiously to convert the common metal lead to valuable gold. Today, chemists are repurposing discarded solar panels to create valuable organic compounds from carbon dioxide (CO2), a common greenhouse gas.

Significantly reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to mitigate the most devastating effects of climate change will require a large reduction in emissions as well as strategies designed to sequester emitted CO2 and other offending gases. While simply sequestering greenhouse gases would fulfill this goal, creating useful organic chemicals from waste CO2 is akin to generating valuable materials from trash.

A team of chemists from Yokohama National University, Electric Power Development Co., Ltd. and the Renewable Energy Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) recently decided to tackle two waste problems—excess CO2 emissions and decommissioned —in the pursuit of creating value-added organic chemicals. The team designed a study to determine if recycled components of discarded solar panels could be used to efficiently convert CO2 into useful, carbon-based compounds.

‘Ice cube’ clouds discovered at the galaxy’s center shouldn’t exist — and they hint at a recent black hole explosion

Twin orbs of superhot plasma at the Milky Way’s center known as the “Fermi bubbles” contain inexplicable clouds of cold hydrogen, new research reveals. They could help scientists figure out when our galaxy’s black hole last erupted.

Observation of charge–parity symmetry breaking in baryon decays

The LHCb experiment is being built, operated and maintained by the LHCb Collaboration. All authors contributed to the design, construction, deployment and operation of the detector, the data taking, the development of the reconstruction and simulation software, data processing and data analysis. The final manuscript was reviewed and approved by all authors.

Correspondence to X. Yang.

Scientists successfully develop half metal material that conducts single-spin electrons

Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich have successfully created the world’s first experimentally verified two-dimensional half metal—a material that conducts electricity using electrons of just one spin type: either “spin-up” or “spin-down.” Their findings, now published as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Letters, mark a milestone in the quest for materials enabling energy-efficient spintronic that go beyond conventional electronics.

Half metals are key to spintronics: Unlike traditional conductors, half metals allow only one spin orientation to pass through. This makes them ideal candidates for spintronics, a next-generation information technology that leverages both the charge and the spin of electrons for data storage and processing. In conventional electronics, on the other hand, only the charge is used.

However, all known half metals operate only at and lose their special properties at the surface—limiting their use. This was until now, when the team at Forschungszentrum Jülich engineered a 2D half metal in the form of an ultrathin alloy of iron and palladium, just two atoms thick, on a palladium crystal. Using a state-of-the-art imaging technique called spin-resolved momentum microscopy, they showed that the alloy allows only one spin type to conduct, confirming the long-sought 2D half-metallicity.