Marc-Henri Julien, LNCMI Grenoble. The upper critical field, Hc2, is a fundamental, and technologically important property that measures the ability of a superconductor to withstand magnetic fields. Recently, there has been a controversy regarding Hc2 values in high-Tc copper-oxides, particularly in the context of the competition between superconductivity and [...]
LNCMI, France. Published on Mar 6, 2019. I am group leader for the development of high-strength materials at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses. I obtained an Engineer diploma in physics/materials science from the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Toulouse [...]
T. Gottschall, HLD Dresden. The giant magnetocaloric effect, in which large thermal changes are induced in a material on the application of a magnetic field, can be used for refrigeration applications. However, commercial uptake is limited. Researchers from Barcelona, Darmstadt, and the HLD proposed an approach to magnetic cooling [...]
A 40-T pulsed magnet for single crystal elastic neutron scattering, featuring an unprecedented high duty cycle, now offers new opportunities to investigate magnetic systems down to 2 K at the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble (France).
Gabriel Seyfarth, LNCMI Grenoble. A new Faraday-balance magnetometer for low temperatures and high magnetic fields has been developed at LNCMI Grenoble. It has been designed to probe the sample magnetization. The determination of absolute values is possible via separate calibration measurements.
Lisa Rossi, Lijnis Nelemans, Ben Bryant, HFML Nijmegen. Together with technicians and scientists from HFML Nijmegen, PhD student Lisa Rossi designed and built a scanning probe microscope (SPM) for operation at cryogenic temperatures in extremely high magnetic fields. It is the only one in the world that can measure in fields above 30 Tesla.
Jiangxiazi Lin, Ning Wang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Benjamin Piot, LNCMI-Grenoble. Semiconducting two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have been a recent hot research topic in physics, for their novel optical/electronic properties and potential applications.
C. Shekhar, MPI CPfS Dresden and Y. Skourski, HLD Dresden. In 1929, Hermann Weyl discovered that massless spin-1/2 particles are solutions of the Dirac equation. After many decades, these Weyl particles were finally experimentally revealed in 2015 in simple semimetallic materials such as TaAs. Weyl fermions are low-energy quasiparticle excitations in the vicinity of the unavoidable touching points of a valence band and a conduction band: these materials are “Weyl semimetals”.
M. van Delft, S. Pezzini, T. Khouri, C. Müller, N. Hussey, S. Wiedmann, HFML Nijmegen. Researchers from Germany, USA, UK, and the HFML Nijmegen have found evidence for electron-hole tunneling in momentum space in the nodal-line semimetal HfSiS. This specific tunneling phenomenon is revealed in quantum oscillations of the electrical resistance at low temperatures and in high magnetic fields, and can be illustrated as a ‘figure-of-eight orbit’ enclosing one electron and one hole pocket.
Cyril Proust, LNCMI-Toulouse and Louis Taillefer, University of Sherbrooke. Measuring the electrical resistance of a new material is often the first experiment that researchers do, but also often the last to be understood. Nevertheless, the temperature dependence of the electrical resistance gives essential information on the ground state of materials.