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Physicists Puzzle over Emergence of Electron Aggregates
Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.
The story that led to last year’s discoveries began back in 1879, when Edwin Hall, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, applied a magnetic field vertically through a flat metal ribbon with a current flowing along it. In the late ’80s, the theorist Duncan Haldane, then at the University of California, San Diego, predicted that it might even be possible to see integer plateaus without the aid of an external magnetic field — a so-called quantum anomalous Hall effect. A breakthrough came a year ago when a University of Washington team, led by Xiaodong Xu, managed to observe the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in a moiré material made of stacked and twisted layers of molybdenum ditelluride, a type of TMD.
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