Control of chiral orbital currents in a colossal magnetoresistance material.

Colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) is an extraordinary enhancement of the electrical conductivity in the presence of a magnetic field. It is conventionally associated with a field-induced spin polarization that drastically reduces spin scattering and electric resistance. Ferrimagnetic MnSiTe is an intriguing exception to this rule: it exhibits a seven-order-of-magnitude reduction in ab plane resistivity that occurs only when a magnetic polarization is avoided.

Magnetic memory and spontaneous vortices in a van der Waals superconductor.

Doped Mott insulators exhibit some of the most intriguing quantum phases of matter, including quantum spin liquids, unconventional superconductors and non-Fermi liquid metals. Such phases often arise when itinerant electrons are close to a Mott insulating state, and thus experience strong spatial correlations. Proximity between different layers of van der Waals heterostructures naturally realizes a platform for experimentally studying the relationship between localized, correlated electrons and itinerant electrons.

Quantum Entropic Self-Localization with Ultracold Fermions.

We study a driven, spin-orbit coupled fermionic system in a lattice at the resonant regime where the drive frequency equals the Hubbard repulsion, for which nontrivial constrained dynamics emerge at fast timescales. An effective density-dependent tunneling model is derived, and it is examined in the sparse filling regime in one dimension. The system exhibits entropic self-localization, where while even numbers of atoms propagate ballistically, odd numbers form localized bound states induced by an effective attraction from a higher configurational entropy.

Scaling and data collapse from local moments in frustrated disordered quantum spin systems.

Recently measurements on various spin-1/2 quantum magnets such as HLiIrO, LiZnMoO, ZnCu(OH)Cl and 1T-TaS-all described by magnetic frustration and quenched disorder but with no other common relation-nevertheless showed apparently universal scaling features at low temperature. In particular the heat capacity C[H, T] in temperature T and magnetic field H exhibits T/H data collapse reminiscent of scaling near a critical point. Here we propose a theory for this scaling collapse based on an emergent random-singlet regime extended to include spin-orbit coupling and antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions.

Correlated states in β-LiIrO driven by applied magnetic fields.

Magnetic honeycomb iridates are thought to show strongly spin-anisotropic exchange interactions which, when highly frustrated, lead to an exotic state of matter known as the Kitaev quantum spin liquid. However, in all known examples these materials magnetically order at finite temperatures, the scale of which may imply weak frustration. Here we show that the application of a relatively small magnetic field drives the three-dimensional magnet β-LiIrO from its incommensurate ground state into a quantum correlated paramagnet.

Mean-Field Scaling of the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition in a 2D Optical Superlattice.

The mean-field treatment of the Bose-Hubbard model predicts properties of lattice-trapped gases to be insensitive to the specific lattice geometry once system energies are scaled by the lattice coordination number z. We test this scaling directly by comparing coherence properties of ^{87}Rb gases that are driven across the superfluid to Mott insulator transition within optical lattices of either the kagome (z=4) or the triangular (z=6) geometries. The coherent fraction measured for atoms in the kagome lattice is lower than for those in a triangular lattice with the same interaction and tunneling energies.

Transport evidence for Fermi-arc-mediated chirality transfer in the Dirac semimetal Cd3As2.

The dispersion of charge carriers in a metal is distinctly different from that of free electrons owing to their interactions with the crystal lattice. These interactions may lead to quasiparticles mimicking the massless relativistic dynamics of high-energy particle physics, and they can twist the quantum phase of electrons into topologically non-trivial knots-producing protected surface states with anomalous electromagnetic properties. These effects intertwine in materials known as Weyl semimetals, and in their crystal-symmetry-protected analogues, Dirac semimetals.

Quantum oscillations from surface Fermi arcs in Weyl and Dirac semimetals.

In a magnetic field, electrons in metals repeatedly traverse closed magnetic orbits around the Fermi surface. The resulting oscillations in the density of states enable powerful experimental techniques for measuring a metal's Fermi surface structure. On the other hand, the surface states of Weyl semimetals consist of disjoint, open Fermi arcs raising the question of whether they can be observed by standard quantum oscillatory techniques.

Landau quantization and quasiparticle interference in the three-dimensional Dirac semimetal Cd₃As₂.

Condensed-matter systems provide a rich setting to realize Dirac and Majorana fermionic excitations as well as the possibility to manipulate them for potential applications. It has recently been proposed that chiral, massless particles known as Weyl fermions can emerge in certain bulk materials or in topological insulator multilayers and give rise to unusual transport properties, such as charge pumping driven by a chiral anomaly. A pair of Weyl fermions protected by crystalline symmetry effectively forming a massless Dirac fermion has been predicted to appear as low-energy excitations in a number of materials termed three-dimensional Dirac semimetals.

Realization of a three-dimensional spin-anisotropic harmonic honeycomb iridate.

Spin and orbital quantum numbers play a key role in the physics of Mott insulators, but in most systems they are connected only indirectly--via the Pauli exclusion principle and the Coulomb interaction. Iridium-based oxides (iridates) introduce strong spin-orbit coupling directly, such that these numbers become entwined together and the Mott physics attains a strong orbital character. In the layered honeycomb iridates this is thought to generate highly spin-anisotropic magnetic interactions, coupling the spin to a given spatial direction of exchange and leading to strongly frustrated magnetism.

Wannier permanent wave functions for featureless bosonic mott insulators on the 1/3-filled kagome lattice.

We study Bose-Hubbard models on tight-binding, non-Bravais lattices, with a filling of one boson per unit cell--and thus fractional site filling. We discuss situations where no classical bosonic insulator, which is a product state of particles on independent sites, is admitted. Nevertheless, we show that it is possible to construct a quantum Mott insulator of bosons if a trivial band insulator of fermions is possible at the same filling.

Measured depletion of ions at the biomembrane interface.

Expected from theory and simulations, depletion of ions at fuzzy biomembrane interfaces has long eluded experiments. Here, we show how salt exclusion can be accurately measured by surprisingly simple yet accurate benchtop measurements. Multilamellar aggregates of common phospholipids sink in low salt but float in salt solutions that are much less dense than the lipid itself.