Latest Heavy fermion Stories

Physicists show standard ‘quasiparticle’ theory breaks down at ‘quantum critical point’ A new study this week finds that “quantum critical points” in exotic electronic materials can act much like polarizing “hot button issues” in an election. Reporting in Nature, researchers from Rice University, two Max Planck Institutes in Dresden, Germany, and UCLA find that on either side of a quantum critical point, electrons fall into line and behave as traditionally expected, but at...

Sophisticated electron-imaging technique reveals widespread "destruction," offering clues to how material works as a superconductor It's a basic technique learned early, maybe even before kindergarten: Pulling things apart - from toy cars to complicated electronic materials - can reveal a lot about how they work. "That's one way physicists study the things that they love; they do it by destroying them," said Séamus Davis, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven...

US-European team revisits 30-year-old breakthrough with new methods, understandingEuropean and U.S. physicists this week are offering up the strongest evidence yet that magnetism is the driving force behind unconventional superconductivity. The findings by researchers from Rice University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, and other institutions were published online today in Nature Physics.The findings follow more than three decades of...

Findings reveal characteristics of "hidden order" in unusual uranium compound and demonstrate new method for investigating long-standing physics problemsUsing a microscope designed to image the arrangement and interactions of electrons in crystals, scientists have captured the first images of electrons that appear to take on extraordinary mass under certain extreme conditions. The technique reveals the origin of an unusual electronic phase transition in one particular material, and opens the...