NUM division - Featured Research
The importance of knowing your stripes
A collaboration between three NUM laboratories has found that magnetic ‘stripe order’ in high-temperature superconductors not only co-exists with superconducting order, but might very well be intimately connected with it.
Frustratingly disordered
A study of how disorder affects a ‘frustrated’ magnet reveals a surprising robustness of the underlying quantum many-body state, and provides evidence for emerging quantum phenomena induced by disorder.
From golden emperor to filled Buddha
Ancient metal objects are illuminated by neutrons at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. This enables researchers to discover what is hidden inside them, how they were made and how they can be preserved.
The hard worker from Val Mesolcina
For Aldo Antognini, physics and conviviality are in the bloodPSI researcher Aldo Antognini has received more than 2.2 million Swiss francs from the EU for his latest experiment. He wants to find out how magnetism is distributed in the proton. The particle physicist will be able to apply not only his scientific and technical talents, but his social flair as well.
Diving into magnets
For the first time, scientists have made visible the directions of the magnetisation inside a 3D magnetic object. The smallest details in their visualisation were ten thousand times smaller than a millimetre. Among others, the magnetic structure contained one outstanding kind of pattern: magnetic singularities called Bloch points, which up to now were only known in theory.
New quantum state observed in a Shastry–Sutherland compound
Scientists from PSI and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have shown experimentally, for the first time, a quantum phase transition in strontium copper borate, the only material to date that realizes the famous Shastry–Sutherland quantum many-body model.
Distinct, but not so different
Among superconducting materials, CeCoIn5 stands out as a rare case where superconductivity gives rise to magnetic order. An international team led by PSI physicist Michel Kenzelmann now reports that when small amounts of impurities are implanted into CeCoIn5, then two distinct magnetic phases appear — and these are surprisingly similar to one another.
Climbing the ladder
Quantum phenomena can lead to intriguing effects in materials, but are famously difficult to predict and understand. A combined experimental and theoretical study of a model quantum system provides insight into excitations that involve multiple particles at once.