{"id":123428,"date":"2021-06-04T16:56:22","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T23:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/magnetism-drives-metals-to-insulators-in-new-experiment"},"modified":"2021-06-04T16:56:22","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T23:56:22","slug":"magnetism-drives-metals-to-insulators-in-new-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/magnetism-drives-metals-to-insulators-in-new-experiment","title":{"rendered":"Magnetism drives metals to insulators in new experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/magnetism-drives-metals-to-insulators-in-new-experiment.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Like all metals, silver, copper, and gold are conductors. Electrons flow across them, carrying heat and electricity. While gold is a good conductor under any conditions, some materials have the property of behaving like metal conductors only if temperatures are high enough; at low temperatures, they act like insulators and do not do a good job of carrying electricity. In other words, these unusual materials go from acting like a chunk of gold to acting like a piece of wood as temperatures are lowered. Physicists have developed theories to explain this so-called metal-insulator transition, but the mechanisms behind the transitions are not always clear.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn some cases, it is not easy to predict whether a material is a <a href=\" https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/metal\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">metal<\/a> or an insulator,\u201d explains Caltech visiting associate Yejun Feng of the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology Graduate University. \u201cMetals are always good conductors no matter what, but some other so-called apparent metals are insulators for reasons that are not well understood.\u201d Feng has puzzled over this question for at least five years; others on his team, such as collaborator David Mandrus at the University of Tennessee, have thought about the problem for more than two decades.<\/p>\n<p>Now, a new study from Feng and colleagues, published in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, offers the cleanest experimental proof yet of a <a href=\" https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/metal-insulator+transition\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">metal-insulator transition<\/a> theory proposed 70 years ago by physicist John Slater. According to that theory, magnetism, which results when the so-called \u201cspins\u201d of electrons in a material are organized in an orderly fashion, can solely drive the metal-insulator transition; in other previous experiments, changes in the lattice structure of a material or <a href=\" https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electron+interactions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electron interactions<\/a> based on their charges have been deemed responsible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like all metals, silver, copper, and gold are conductors. Electrons flow across them, carrying heat and electricity. While gold is a good conductor under any conditions, some materials have the property of behaving like metal conductors only if temperatures are high enough; at low temperatures, they act like insulators and do not do a good [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}