Research highlights

Researchers from HMFL-FELIX and the University of Illinois have joined together to review experimental and theoretical progress toward understanding the nature of strange metals, a phase of matter with unconventional transport properties that is manifest in various exotic materials such as the cuprate high-temperature superconductors. The article has just appeared in print in the journal Science.

HFML-FELIX researchers exposed hole- doped Germanium to intense free-electron laser radiation and high magnetic fields up to 33T.  The used experimental technique and the results of their experiments demonstrate the exciting new possibilities for researching nonlinear magneto-optical processes in solids. The results have been published in Physical Review B (Editors' Suggestion).

A team of researchers from HFML-FELIX, Aarhus University and the University of Bristol have investigated the versatile semimetal WTe2 by measuring quantum oscillations in charge transport and revealed peculiar electron trajectories that depend sensitively on the electron scattering in the material. The results are published as a Letter in Physical Review Research.

Researchers from HFML-FELIX and the IMM have worked closely together to address the quest of molecular magnetic anisotropy experimentally. The outcomes are relevant for the fundamental understanding of magnetic anisotropy, and can be useful in the design of materials for technological applications.

Investigation of the electronic subbands properties of the quasi- 2DEG at a fairly new 5d-oxide heterointerface, LaAlO3/KTaO3, via quantum oscillations in high magnetic fields. In addition to the detailed information about the band structure of KTaO3-2DEG, this study paves a way to create a high-mobility 2DEG based on other 5d oxides for which constructing an epitaxial heterointerface is almost impossible.

At HFML-FELIX, physics is one of our central topics of interest. But what does the general public know about physics and the ways in which it supports and impacts our daily lives? New research on the portrayal and framing of physics in Dutch newspapers.

Superconductivity in cuprates: ‘from maximal to minimal dissipation’ - a new paradigm?Researchers at HFML-FELIX used some of Europe’s strongest continuous magnetic fields to uncover evidence of exotic charge carriers in the metallic state of copper-oxide high-temperature superconductors (high-Tc cuprates). Their results have been published this week in Nature [1]. In a related publication in SciPost Physics last week [2], the team postulated that it is these exotic charge carriers that form the superconducting pairs, in marked contrast with expectations from conventional theory.

Researchers of the TU Dortmund, the Ioffe Institute and ITMO University (both in St. Petersburg) and the High Field Magnet Laboratory have resolved a long-standing open question concerning the anomalous polarization of light emitted by colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals in a magnetic field.

Researchers from the UK and three of the EMFL laboratories have uncovered a striking crossover in the carrier density across the so-called ‘strange metal’ phase of overdoped cuprate superconductors. The work sheds important new light on the nature of the so-called ‘strange metal’ phase out of which high-temperature superconductivity emerges.

HFML researchers discovered an anomalous vortex state in several families of cuprate superconductors at high magnetic fields. This new state, believed to be caused by an intricate interplay between the superconducting vortex state and charge order, may be essential to understand the evolution of the cuprate phase diagram.