Category archives: DIPC Advanced materials

In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to a few degrees above absolute zero and watched its electrical resistance vanish. Lead soon joined the list of superconductors, losing its resistance below about 7.2 kelvin. A full explanation arrived in 1957: electrons bind into Cooper pairs that move together as one collective state below a critical […]

Nickel disulfide, NiS₂, is an unusual material. Its interior behaves as an electrical insulator, blocking the flow of current, while certain parts of its surface conduct electricity freely. This contradiction has puzzled physicists for decades, and a recent study offers a detailed explanation. The conduction, it turns out, is confined to tiny one-dimensional steps on […]

One of the most striking discoveries in condensed matter physics over the past few years is that simply rotating one atomically thin crystal on top of an identical layer can create entirely new electronic behavior. This idea became famous in 2018, when physicists found that graphene sheets stacked at a very particular “magic angle” could […]

Building electronic devices often requires stacking different crystalline materials on top of one another with atomic precision. This process, called heteroepitaxy, works best when the two crystals share similar atomic patterns. When their symmetries differ, the upper crystal tends to grow in several orientations at once instead of a single one, creating defects that degrade […]

Chirality is one of the most familiar ideas in science. Human hands are chiral because the left and right hand are mirror images that cannot be perfectly aligned on top of one another. The same idea appears in chemistry, where molecules with opposite handedness can behave very differently. In recent years, physicists have discovered that […]

In recent years, “twistronics” has shown that simply changing how two crystal layers sit on top of each other can completely transform their electronic behavior. When two lattices are slightly mismatched in size or rotated by a small angle, they create a larger repeating interference pattern called a moiré superlattice. This long-wavelength pattern acts like […]

In the world of quantum materials, some of the most important discoveries come not from finding new particles, but from learning to see familiar electrons in a new way. A striking example comes from a single layer of niobium diselenide, a crystal just one layer thick, where researchers have now directly mapped a hidden pattern […]

New research numerically demonstrates how carefully structured materials can control light in ways that are both precise and robust. It brings together ideas from photonics and topology to show how a laser can emerge from the boundary between two distinct optical regimes. The physical system considered in the study is a bilayer photonic crystal. A […]

Every time a computer processes information, electrons shuttle through circuits carrying electric charge, and much of the energy they carry is wasted as heat. Spintronics proposes a different approach: instead of relying solely on the charge of electrons, exploit another of their properties called spin, a quantum-mechanical quantity that can be thought of as a […]

When we peel a crystal down to its very last layer, the physics governing its behavior undergoes a radical shift. This transition from the bulk (three-dimensional) to the two-dimensional limit is where some of the most exotic phenomena in condensed matter physics emerge. Among these, Titanium Diselenide, or TiSe₂, has long fascinated researchers because of […]