Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy for Irregularly Shaped Samples and Its Application to Uranium Ditelluride.

Resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) is a powerful technique for measuring the full elastic tensor of a given material in a single experiment. Previously, this technique was practically limited to regularly shaped samples such as rectangular parallelepipeds, spheres, and cylinders [W. M.

Rapid method for computing the mechanical resonances of irregular objects.

A solid object's geometry, density, and elastic moduli completely determine its spectrum of normal modes. Solving the inverse problem-determining a material's elastic moduli given a set of resonance frequencies and sample geometry-relies on the ability to compute resonance spectra accurately and efficiently. Established methods for calculating these spectra are either fast but limited to simple geometries, or are applicable to arbitrarily shaped samples at the cost of being prohibitively slow.

Linear-in temperature resistivity from an isotropic Planckian scattering rate.

A variety of 'strange metals' exhibit resistivity that decreases linearly with temperature as the temperature decreases to zero, in contrast to conventional metals where resistivity decreases quadratically with temperature. This linear-in-temperature resistivity has been attributed to charge carriers scattering at a rate given by ħ/τ = αkT, where α is a constant of order unity, ħ is the Planck constant and k is the Boltzmann constant. This simple relationship between the scattering rate and temperature is observed across a wide variety of materials, suggesting a fundamental upper limit on scattering-the 'Planckian limit'-but little is known about the underlying origins of this limit.

Thermal Hall conductivity in the cuprate Mott insulators NdCuO and SrCuOCl.

The heat carriers responsible for the unexpectedly large thermal Hall conductivity of the cuprate Mott insulator LaCuO were recently shown to be phonons. However, the mechanism by which phonons in cuprates acquire chirality in a magnetic field is still unknown. Here, we report a similar thermal Hall conductivity in two cuprate Mott insulators with significantly different crystal structures and magnetic orders - NdCuO and SrCuOCl - and show that two potential mechanisms can be excluded - the scattering of phonons by rare-earth impurities and by structural domains.