Scientists from around the world have made a breakthrough discovery in understanding how certain materials behave differently when it comes to electricity. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are researching this strange phenomenon called “strange metals”.
Yashar Komijani, a scientist from UC College of Arts and Sciences, was part of an experiment using a special metal. It’s made from a mix of ytterbium – a rare metal. At a lab in Japan, scientists shot radioactive gamma rays at the metal to observe its unusual electrical properties.
Scientists from the University of Hyogo and RIKEN, led by Hisao Kobayashi, just released an experiment in Science magazine. They found unusually varying electrical charges in a material called “strange metal”.
Expanding on this, one expert – Komijani – explained that “normally in metals there are lots of electrons moving around on a framework (or lattice) of ions.” But due to quantum mechanics principles, these particles can basically act as if they were located in empty space (no ions or electrons).
Komijani has been studying strange metals with quantum mechanics for a while. He said that we can learn many things about something even without taking a direct look at it, just by looking at properties like heat capacity, conductivity, and resistivity. The tricky part is why charge fluctuates slowly in complicated quantum systems.
Physicists are very puzzled because at extremely cold temperatures, charge in a type of metal called “strange metals” moves more slowly than expected. Strange metals are special because they can conduct electricity really well, and this makes them useful for quantum computers.
Piers Coleman, a professor at Rutgers University, is excited about the new discoveries related to strange metal. These metals can help create new forms of electronic matter and they may also lead to technologies that have not even been invented yet. Unfortunately, it’s too early to tell what those technologies might be.
“Michael Faraday was a famous scientist who made lots of discoveries about electricity, and when the British Chancellor William Gladstone asked what good all his discoveries would be, Faraday joked that one day the government might even tax it!”
Faraday really opened up new ways of using electricity.
“We feel kind of the same about this strange metal,” Coleman said. “Copper is a really important metal that can be found in all kinds of things, like our electronics and power lines. It seems like this mysterious metal could also become very popular one day.”
The scientists have been trying to figure out why some metals are so “strange” — this is called quantum criticality. So, the team at UC and Rutgers are going to use their new discovery to try and come up with a theory about these weird metals.
To do the experiment, they used something called a synchrotron, which created tiny particles that were necessary for testing. This type of experiment hasn’t been done like this before!
Researchers in Japan are using something like CERN’s [European Organization for Nuclear Research] particle accelerator, except it releases gamma rays. Instead of having to use radioactive material, they have an on-demand source of gamma rays. They then used a technique called spectroscopy to study how the gamma rays affected the weird metal.
Researchers also studied how quickly electricity moves through metal. It only takes a nanosecond—one billionth of a second! That seems really, really fast, but in the quantum world it’s very slow. Scientists had a theory that tiny vibrations might be slowing it down, and they were right!
This study was done by Hisao Kobayashi, Yui Sakaguchi, Hayato Kitagawa and other scientists and published in Science magazine on March 2nd 2023. It was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE).
