Category Physics

This is a schematic image of the crystal structure of high-entropy-alloy-type REO0.5F0.5BiS2. Credit: Yoshikazu Mizuguchi

Promising strategy for creating state-of-the-art layered superconductors. Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created new superconductors made of layers of bismuth sulfide (BiS2) and a high entropy rare earth alloy oxyfluoride, containing 5 different rare earth (RE) elements at the same crystallographic site. The new material retains superconducting properties over a wider range of lattice parameters than materials without high-entropy-alloy states. Their work promises an exciting new strategy for designing new layered superconductors, a potentially key development in the search for high-temperature superconductors.

Superconductors are key to a range of ...

Yale physicists looked for a signature of a discrete time crystal within a crystal of monoammonium phosphate. Credit: Michael Marsland/Yale University

Yale physicists have uncovered hints of a time crystal – a form of matter that “ticks” when exposed to an electromagnetic pulse – in the last place they expected: a crystal you might find in a child’s toy. The discovery means there are now new puzzles to solve, in terms of how time crystals form in the first place. Ordinary crystals such as salt or quartz are examples of 3D, ordered spatial crystals. Their atoms are arranged in a repeating system, something scientists have known for a century. Time crystals, first identified in 2016, are different...

A PLATED QUBIT DEVICE. PHOTO: D. PAPAS/NIST

A powerful new plated metal combination that superconducts at easily attained temperatures could pave the road for the next critical steps in the development of cutting-edge supercomputers. CIRES chemist and instrument designer Don David and colleagues Dave Pappas and Xian Wu just published the new recipe: an ultrathin layer of rhenium sandwiched between layers of gold, each measuring 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair that can superconduct at critical temperature over 6 Kelvin.

“The sheer magnitude of the critical temperature was unexpected,” said Don David, director of the CIRES Integrated Instrument Development Facility and coauthor on a paper published this week in Applied Physics Letters...