Physicists at Loughborough University have made an exciting breakthrough in understanding how to fine-tune the behaviour of electrons in quantum materials poised to drive the next generation of advanced technologies.

UCF and the University of Washington (UW) were recently awarded $4.2 million for six years from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a quantum materials research and education center as part of the Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program.

In this study, researchers from a large international team including ANSTO, investigated the magnetic properties of two unique 2D triangular lattice antiferromagnetic materials (2D-TLHAF)* using various neutron scattering techniques.

A new paper titled “Layered hybrid superlattices as designable quantum solids” by Professor Xiangfeng Duan, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Zhong Wan and co-authors, recently published in Nature, introduces an exciting advancement in the development of customizable materials for quantum technologies.

Michigan State University chemist Weiwei Xie knows a thing or two about working under pressure. Leveraging extreme forces similar to those found deep within our planet, her lab is pioneering the discovery of novel quantum materials with exciting electronic and magnetic properties.

MIT physicists have taken a key step toward solving the puzzle of what leads electrons to split into fractions of themselves. Their solution sheds light on the conditions that give rise to exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional systems. The new work is an effort to make sense of a discovery that was reported earlier this year by a different group of physicists at MIT, led by Assistant Professor Long Ju. Ju’s team found that electrons appear to exhibit “fractional charge” in pentalayer graphene — a configuration of five graphene layers that are stacked atop a similarly structured sheet of boron nitride.

The material, based on a framework of ruthenium, fulfils the requirements of the ‘Kitaev quantum spin liquid state’ - an elusive phenomenon that scientists have been trying to understand for decades. Published in Nature Communications the study, by scientists at the University of Birmingham, offers an important step towards achieving and controlling quantum materials with sought-after new properties that do not follow classical laws of physics.

One new study, conducted by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University, investigated ways to reliably grow diamond at lower temperatures than those currently used. Diamond has properties that make it attractive to the semiconductor industry. With its particular crystal lattice structure, diamond can withstand high electrical voltages. It’s also very good at dissipating heat.

A new study has uncovered important behavior in the flow of electric current through superconductors, potentially advancing the development of future technologies for controlled quantum information processing. The study is co-authored by Babak Seradjeh, Professor of Physics within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, with theoretical physicists Rekha Kumari and Arijit Kundu of the Indian institute of Technology Kanpur. While the study is theoretical, the research team confirmed their results through numerical simulations. Published in Physical Review Letters, the world’s premier physics journal, the research focuses on “Floquet Majorana fermions” and their role in a phenomenon called the Josephson effect, which could lead to more precise control of the dynamics of driven quantum systems.

The rare-earth metal erbium could play a key role in future quantum networks: researchers from MPQ and TU Munich succeeded in spectrally resolving and individually controlling up to 360 erbium ions.