{"id":95826,"date":"2019-09-05T01:42:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T08:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/scientists-find-new-long-hypothesized-material-state-with-signature-of-quantum-disordered-liquid-like-magnetic-moments"},"modified":"2019-09-05T01:42:28","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T08:42:28","slug":"scientists-find-new-long-hypothesized-material-state-with-signature-of-quantum-disordered-liquid-like-magnetic-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/scientists-find-new-long-hypothesized-material-state-with-signature-of-quantum-disordered-liquid-like-magnetic-moments","title":{"rendered":"Scientists find new, long-hypothesized material state with signature of quantum disordered liquid-like magnetic moments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-find-new-long-hypothesized-material-state-with-signature-of-quantum-disordered-liquid-like-magnetic-moments2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The future of technology relies, to a great extent, on new materials, but the work of developing those materials begins years before any specific application for them is known. Stephen Wilson, a professor of materials in UC Santa Barbara\u2019s College of Engineering, works in that \u201clong before\u201d realm, seeking to create new materials that exhibit desirable new states.<\/p>\n<p>In the paper \u201cField-tunable quantum disordered <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/ground+state\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">ground state<\/a> in the triangular-lattice antiferromagnet NaYbO<sub>2<\/sub>,\u201d published in the journal <i>Nature Physics<\/i>, Wilson and colleagues Leon Balents, of the campus\u2019s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Mark Sherwin, a professor in the Department of Physics, describe their discovery of a long-sought \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+spin+liquid+state\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum spin liquid state<\/a>\u201d in the material NaYbO<sub>2<\/sub> (sodium ytterbium oxide). The study was led by materials student Mitchell Bordelon and also involved physics students Chunxiao Liu, Marzieh Kavand and Yuanqi Lyu, and undergraduate chemistry student Lorenzo Posthuma, as well as collaborators at Boston College and at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.<\/p>\n<p>At the atomic level, electrons in one material\u2019s lattice structure behave differently, both individually and collectively, from those in another material. Specifically, the \u201cspin,\u201d or the electron\u2019s intrinsic magnetic moment (akin to an innate bar magnet) and its tendency to communicate and coordinate with the magnetic moments of nearby electrons differs by material. Various types of spin systems and collective patterns of ordering of these moments are known to occur, and materials scientists are ever seeking new ones, including those that have been hypothesized but not yet shown to exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The future of technology relies, to a great extent, on new materials, but the work of developing those materials begins years before any specific application for them is known. Stephen Wilson, a professor of materials in UC Santa Barbara\u2019s College of Engineering, works in that \u201clong before\u201d realm, seeking to create new materials that exhibit [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95826","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=95826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}