With an atomic structure resembling a Japanese basketweaving pattern, “kagome metal” exhibits exotic, quantum behavior.
A motif of Japanese basketweaving known as the kagome pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades. Kagome baskets are typically made from strips of bamboo woven into a highly symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing triangles.
If a metal or other conductive material could be made to resemble such a kagome pattern at the atomic scale, with individual atoms arranged in similar triangular patterns, it should in theory exhibit exotic electronic properties.
In a paper published today in Nature, physicists from MIT, Harvard University, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report that they have for the first time produced a kagome metal — an electrically conducting crystal, made from layers of iron and tin atoms, with each atomic layer arranged in the repeating pattern of a kagome lattice.
When they flowed a current across the kagome layers within the crystal, the researchers observed that the triangular arrangement of atoms induced strange, quantum-like behaviors in the passing current. Instead of flowing straight through the lattice, electrons instead veered or bent back within the lattice.
This behavior is a three-dimensional cousin of the so-called Quantum Hall effect, in which electrons flowing through a two-dimensional material will exhibit a “chiral, topological state,” in which they bend into tight, circular paths and flow along edges without losing energy.
“By constructing the kagome network of iron, which is inherently magnetic, this exotic behavior persists to room temperature and higher,” says Joseph Checkelsky, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “The charges in the crystal feel not only the magnetic fields from these atoms, but also a purely quantum-mechanical magnetic force from the lattice. This could lead to perfect conduction, akin to superconductivity, in future generations of materials.”
Read more: Physicists discover new quantum electronic material
thumbnail courtesy of mit.edu
