News

The discovery of graphene –a single crystalline sheet of carbon atoms– represents a true breakthrough because not only showcases the amazing level of material control that has been reached, but also it has enabled the observation of a plethora of fascinating physical phenomena. It has been...

Quantum magnets have evolved over the past decade into systems of large interest in fundamental and, increasingly, in applied physics. Their exceptional properties, including non-magnetic ground states, fractionalised excitations and topological order, have become candidate resources for...

Physicists from Rice University and the University of Geneva have verified a key prediction from a 55-year-old theory about one-dimensional electronics that is increasingly relevant thanks to Silicon Valley's inexorable quest for miniaturization.

Transitions between different phases of matter are part of our day-to-day lives: when water freezes, for example, it passes from liquid to solid state. Some of these transitions may be of a different kind, resulting from so-called topological excitations that force all the particles to act in...

Predicting the behaviour of electrons in a material is not easily done. Physicists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), ETH Zurich and EPFL replaced the electrons with ultra-cold neutral lithium atoms that they had circulated in a one-dimensional quantum tube. The scientists were then able to...

Scilight from AIP Publishing is talking about a recent publication of Hugo Meley and coworkers in APL Materials.

A spotlight on the activities of the Group of Applied Superconductivity of the DQMP led by Prof. Carmine Senatore was posted on the official website of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study at CERN.

A unique cryogenic scanning near-field optical microscope (cryo-SNOM) has been installed at the DQMP and is now able to demonstrate the first promising results. In contrast to the conventional optical microscopes, in this system the sample is probed by the so called evanescent electromagnetic...

In a superconductor, the electrons experience very peculiar interactions whose most surprising effect is a total loss of electrical resistance. These materials are therefore promising for future applications, especially since some of them work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. The mechanism...

The terahertz waves span frequency ranges between the infrared spectrum (used, for example, for night vision) and gigahertz waves (which find their application, among other, in Wi-Fi connections). Terahertz waves allow for the detection of materials that are undetectable at other frequencies....

High-precision measurements of thermal diffuse x-ray scattering revealed that the full elasticity tensor can accurately be obtained in a single crystal diffraction experiment. The new method opens the perspective to determine elastic properties together with crystal structure under the same...

Lattice vibrations (phonons) in crystals are typically weakly interacting with the electronic degrees of freedom, such as charge and spin fluctuations. Researchers in the team of Prof. Rüegg (DQMP, University of Geneva and LNS, Paul Scherrer Institute) together with collaborators from the École...

Strontium titanate is a material with a unique combination of different properties. In its pristine state it is an insulator with a band gap of 3 eV. In the absence of zero-point fluctuations (ZPF) the material would be ferroelectric at low temperatures, and the material can be made ferroelectric...

During the plenary series at Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC 2016), Prof. Carmine Senatore gave a talk entitled "30 Years to High Temperature Superconductivity: Status and Perspectives".

Some materials hold surprising — and possibly useful — properties: Neodymium nickel oxide is either a metal or an insulator, depending on temperature. This characteristic makes the material a potential candidate for transistors in modern electronic devices. To understand how neodymium nickel...

Crystalline solids have particlelike, low-energy excitations — so-called quasiparticles — that describe collective states of many electrons interacting with the atomic nuclei. In 2015, scientists predicted the existence of an exotic new quasiparticle, dubbed a type-II Weyl fermion, that breaks ...

Superconductivity with a high critical temperature (high Tc) continues to present a theoretical mystery. While this phenomenon is experimentally well established, no scientist has managed to explain its mechanism. In the late 90’s, the British physicist Anthony Leggett proposed a scenario based...

Valleytronics is an emerging field in electronics, where one plays with the momentum of electrons rather than with their electric charge. As the attainable momenta cluster near the minima (the so-called valleys) of the conduction band, the electrons effectively acquire an additional valley index,...