{"id":217355,"date":"2025-07-08T02:17:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T07:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/light-and-heavy-electrons-cooperate-in-magic-angle-superconductors"},"modified":"2025-07-08T02:17:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T07:17:25","slug":"light-and-heavy-electrons-cooperate-in-magic-angle-superconductors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/light-and-heavy-electrons-cooperate-in-magic-angle-superconductors","title":{"rendered":"Light and heavy electrons cooperate in magic-angle superconductors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-and-heavy-electrons-cooperate-in-magic-angle-superconductors2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Electrons play many roles in solid materials. When they are weakly bound and able to travel\u2014i.e., mobile\u2014they can enable electrical conduction. When they are bound, or \u201cheavy,\u201d they can act as insulators. However, in certain solid materials, this behavior can be markedly different, raising questions about how these different types of electrons interact.<\/p>\n<p>In a study just <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41567-025-02956-z\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Physics<\/i>, researchers working with Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Amir Yacoby at Harvard examined the interplay between both types of electrons in this material, shedding new <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/light\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">light<\/a> on how they may help form novel quantum states.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBefore our work, people could only ask \u2018What is the overall ground state?\u2019\u201d said Andrew T. Pierce, one of the paper\u2019s lead authors. Pierce, currently a fellow at Cornell University, was a graduate student in Yacoby\u2019s lab when they began to study this question. What wasn\u2019t clear was the true nature of these different states and how the separate light and heavy electrons joined forces to form them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Electrons play many roles in solid materials. When they are weakly bound and able to travel\u2014i.e., mobile\u2014they can enable electrical conduction. When they are bound, or \u201cheavy,\u201d they can act as insulators. However, in certain solid materials, this behavior can be markedly different, raising questions about how these different types of electrons interact. In a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217355","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=217355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}