> New 'Half-Ice, Half-Fire' Phase of Matter Found Lurking in a Magnet
In 2016, physicists Weiguo Yin, Christopher Roth, and Alexei Tsvelik of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US identified what they referred to as a "half-fire, half-ice" phase of spin-states in Sr3CuIrO6, a mix of strontium, copper, iridium, and oxygen.
Now, they have found the opposite: a half-ice, half-fire phase, in which the electrons within two different structures swap behaviors.
Critical to the discovery is a concept referred to as frustration, a description of interactions between neighboring particles. Change one piece of the puzzle, a change in behavior can ripple across the board as a phase shift.
In the team's half-fire, half-ice material, spins of electrons on a lattice of copper atoms are disordered like the flickering flames of an inferno. Those of the iridium sites are frozen in place, giving them a stronger magnetic pull.
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-half-ice-half-fire-phase-of-matter-found-lurking-in-a-magnet