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First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry


Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous.

In recent years, they’ve found that 2D crystals — flat lattices of atoms in which electrons can move in two directions — host a wild variety of quantum behaviors. And with topological materials in particular, dialing the knobs and then returning to the initial conditions — in other words, tracing a looping path around the torus — leaves the electrons’ arrow pointing in a different direction from before. “We can start to search for the same mechanism” in other materials, said Päivi Törmä, a physicist at Aalto University in Finland who helped explain the exotic superconductivity in terms of the quantum metric, “and that can be very promising.”

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