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Surprising discovery may offer clues to emergence of high-temperature superconductivityUPTON, NY — Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a “quantum spin liquid” — a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of...

Free whitepaper – Shutterfly and Cleversafe: The Path to a Picture Perfect Data Storage Solution A state of magnetism predicted in 1987 has been observed for the first time at MIT, with researchers saying that it might one day find applications in storage and communications technologies. The “one day” is still quite some way off, however, with the researchers only at the very beginning of observing the properties of what’s called a “quantum spin liquid” (QSL). The properties of a quantum spin liquid are revealed in the spin properties of atoms in a crystal. Rather than settling into a stable...