condensed matter physics

Spotting the spin of the Majorana fermion under the microscope

Posted on October 12, 2017October 12, 2017 by Catherine Zandonella

Majorana detection — The figure shows a schematic of the experiment. A magnetized scanning tunneling microscope tip was used to probe the spin property of the quantum wave function of the Majorana fermion at the end of a chain of iron atoms on the surface of a superconductor made of lead. Image courtesy of Yazdani Lab, Princeton University.

By Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research

Researchers at Princeton University have detected a unique quantum property of an elusive particle notable for behaving simultaneously like matter and antimatter. The particle, known as the Majorana fermion, is prized by researchers for its potential to open the doors to new quantum computing possibilities.

In the study published this week in the journal Science, the research team described how they enhanced an existing imaging technique, called scanning tunneling microscopy, to capture signals from the Majorana particle at both ends of an atomically thin iron wire stretched on the surface of a crystal of lead. Their method involved detecting a distinctive quantum property known as spin, which has been proposed for transmitting quantum information in circuits that contain the Majorana particle.

“The spin property of Majoranas distinguishes them from other types of quasi-particles that emerge in materials,” said Ali Yazdani, Princeton’s Class of 1909 Professor of Physics. “The experimental detection of this property provides a unique signature of this exotic particle.”

The finding builds on the team’s 2014 discovery, also published in Science, of the Majorana fermion in a single atom-wide chain of iron atoms atop a lead substrate. In that study, the scanning tunneling microscope was used to visualize Majoranas for the first time, but provided no other measurements of their properties.

“Our aim has been to probe some of the specific quantum properties of Majoranas. Such experiments provide not only further confirmation of their existence in our chains, but open up possible ways of using them.” Yazdani said.

First theorized in the late 1930s by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, the particle is fascinating because it acts as its own antiparticle. In the last few years, scientists have realized that they can engineer one-dimensional wires, such as the chains of atoms on the superconducting surface in the current study, to make Majorana fermions emerge in solids. In these wires, Majoranas occur as pairs at either end of the chains, provided the chains are long enough for the Majoranas to stay far enough apart that they do not annihilate each other. In a quantum computing system, information could be simultaneously stored at both ends of the wire, providing a robustness against outside disruptions to the inherently fragile quantum states.

Previous experimental efforts to detect Majoranas have used the fact that it is both a particle and an antiparticle. The telltale signature is called a zero-bias peak in a quantum tunneling measurement. But studies have shown that such signals could also occur due to a pair of ordinary quasiparticles that can emerge in superconductors. Professor of Physics Andrei Bernevig and his team, who with Yazdani’s group proposed the atomic chain platform, developed the theory that showed that spin-polarized measurements made using a scanning tunneling microscope can distinguish between the presence of a pair of ordinary quasi-particles and a Majorana.

Typically, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) involves dragging a fine-tipped electrode over a structure, in this case the chain of iron atoms, and detecting its electronic properties, from which an image can be constructed. To perform spin-sensitive measurements, the researchers create electrodes that are magnetized in different orientations. These “spin-polarized” STM measurements revealed signatures that agree with the theoretical calculations by Bernevig and his team.

“It turns out that, unlike in the case of a conventional quasi-particle, the spin of the Majorana cannot be screened out by the background. In this sense it is a litmus test for the presence of the Majorana state,” Bernevig said.

The quantum spin property of Majorana may also make them more useful for applications in quantum information. For example, wires with Majoranas at either end can be used to transfer information between far away quantum bits that rely on the spin of electrons. Entanglement of the spins of electrons and Majoranas may be the next step in harnessing their properties for quantum information transfer.

The STM studies were conducted by three co-first authors in the Yazdani group: scientist Sangjun Jeon, graduate student Yonglong Xie, and former postdoctoral research associate Jian Li (now a professor at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China). The research also included contributions from postdoctoral research associate Zhijun Wang in Bernevig’s group.

This work has been supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of the EPiQS initiative (grant GBMF4530), U.S. Office of Naval Research (grants ONR-N00014-14-1-0330, ONR-N00014-11-1-0635, and ONR- N00014-13-1-0661) , the National Science Foundation through the NSF-MRSEC program (grants DMR-142054 and DMR-1608848) and an EAGER Award (grant NOA -AWD1004957), the U.S. Army Research Office MURI program (grant W911NF-12-1-046), the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the Simons Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton.

The study, “Distinguishing a Majorana zero mode using spin resolved measurements,” was published in the journal Science on Thursday, October 12, 2017.

Theorists propose new class of topological metals with exotic electronic properties (Physics Review X)

Posted on January 30, 2017January 30, 2017 by Catherine Zandonella

Band structure spectral function — A new theory explains the behavior of a class of metals with exotic electronic properties. Credit: Muechler et al., Physics Review X

By Tien Nguyen, Department of Chemistry

Researchers at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Zurich have proposed a theory-based approach to characterize a class of metals that possess exotic electronic properties that could help scientists find other, similarly-endowed materials.

Published in the journal Physical Review X, the study described a new class of metals based on their symmetry and a mathematical classification known as a topological number, which is predictive of special electronic properties. Topological materials have drawn intense research interest since the early 2000s culminating in last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to three physicists, including F. Duncan Haldane, Princeton’s Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, for theoretical discoveries in this area.

“Topological classification is a very general way of looking at the properties of materials,” said Lukas Muechler, a Princeton graduate student in the laboratory of Roberto Car, Princeton’s Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry and lead author on the article.

A popular way of explaining this abstract mathematical classification involves breakfast items. In topological classification, donuts and coffee cups are equivalent because they both have one hole and can be smoothly deformed into one another. Meanwhile donuts cannot deform into muffins which makes them inequivalent. The number of holes is an example of a topological invariant that is equal for the donut and coffee cup, but distinguishes between the donut and the muffin.

“The idea is that you don’t really care about the details. As long as two materials have the same topological invariants, we can say they are topologically equivalent,” he said.

Muechler and his colleagues’ interest in the topological classification of this new class of metals was sparked by a peculiar discovery in the neighboring laboratory of Robert Cava, Princeton’s Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry. While searching for superconductivity in a crystal called tungsten telluride (WTe₂₎, the Cava lab instead found that the material could continually increase its resistance in response to ever stronger magnetic fields – a property that might be used to build a sensor of magnetic fields.

The origin of this property was, however, mysterious. “This material has very interesting properties, but there had been no theory around it,” Muechler said.

The researchers first considered the arrangement of the atoms in the WTe₂crystal. Patterns in the arrangement of atoms are known as symmetries, and they fall into two fundamentally different classes – symmorphic and nonsymmorphic – which lead to profound differences in electronic properties, such as the transport of current in an electromagnetic field.

a) Symmorphic symmetry b) Nonsymmorphic symmetry Credit: Lukas Muechler

While WTe₂is composed of many layers of atoms stacked upon each other, Car’s team found that a single layer of atoms has a particular nonsymmorphic symmetry, where the atomic arrangement is unchanged overall if it is first rotated and then translated by a fraction of the lattice period (see figure).

Having established the symmetry, the researchers mathematically characterized all possible electronic states having this symmetry, and classified those states that can be smoothly deformed into each other as topologically equivalent, just as a donut can be deformed into a cup. From this classification, they found WTe₂belongs to a new class of metals which they coined nonsymmorphic topological metals. These metals are characterized by a different electron number than the nonsymmorphic metals that have previously been studied.

In nonsymmorphic topological metals, the current-carrying electrons behave like relativistic particles, in other words, as particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. This property is not as susceptible to impurities and defects as ordinary metals, making them attractive candidates for electronic devices.

The abstract topological classification also led the researchers to suggest some explanations for some of the outstanding electronic properties of bulk WTe₂, most importantly its perfect compensation, meaning that it has an equal number of holes and electrons. Through theoretical simulations, the researchers found that this property could be achieved in the three-dimensional crystalline stacking of the WTe₂ monolayers, which was a surprising result, Muechler said.

“Usually in theory research there isn’t much that’s unexpected, but this just popped out,” he said. “This abstract classification directly led us to explaining this property. In this sense, it’s a very elegant way of looking at this compound and now you can actually understand or design new compounds with similar properties.”

Recent photoemission experiments have also shown that the electrons in WTe₂ absorb right-handed photons differently than they would left-handed photons. The theory formulated by the researchers showed that these photoemission experiments on WTe₂ can be understood based on the topological properties of this new class of metals.

In future studies, the theorists want to test whether these topological properties are also present in atomically-thin layers of these metals, which could be exfoliated from a larger crystal to make electronic devices. “The study of this phenomena has big implications for the electronics industry, but it’s still in its infant years,” Muechler said.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-FG02-05ER46201), the Yale Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship, the National Science Foundation (NSF CAREER DMR-095242 and NSF-MRSEC DMR-0819860), the Office of Naval Research (ONR-N00014-11-1- 0635), the U.S. Department of Defense (MURI-130-6082), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W. M. Keck Foundation, and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund.

Down the rabbit hole: how electrons travel through exotic new material (Science)

Posted on March 10, 2016March 10, 2016 by Catherine Zandonella

Electrons on the surface of a Weyl semi-metal — Three-dimensional image using scanning tunneling electron microscopy of electrons on the surface of a Weyl semi-metal, a kind of crystal with unusual conducting and insulating properties. Image credit: Yazdani et al, Princeton University.

By Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research

Researchers at Princeton University have observed a bizarre behavior in a strange new crystal that could hold the key for future electronic technologies. Unlike most materials in which electrons travel on the surface, in these new materials the electrons sink into the depths of the crystal through special conductive channels.

“It is like these electrons go down a rabbit hole and show up on the opposite surface,” said Ali Yazdani, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics. “You don’t find anything else like this in other materials.”

The research was published in the journal Science.

Tantalum arsenide — Crystal structure of tantalum arsenide (TaAs), with Ta in blue and As in green. Image credit: Yazdani et al., Princeton University.

Yazdani and his colleagues discovered the odd behavior while studying electrons in a crystal made of layers of tantalum and arsenic. The material, called a Weyl semi-metal, behaves both like a metal, which conducts electrons, and an insulator, which blocks them. A better understanding of these and other “topological” materials someday could lead to new, faster electronic devices.

The team’s experimental results suggest that the surface electrons plunge into the crystal only when traveling at a certain speed and direction of travel called the Weyl momentum, said Yazdani. “It is as if you have an electron on one surface, and it is cruising along, and when it hits some special value of momentum, it sinks into the crystal and appears on the opposite surface,” he said.

These special values of momentum, also called Weyl points, can be thought of as portals where the electrons can depart from the surface and be conducted to the opposing surface. The theory predicts that the points come in pairs, so that a departing electron will make the return trip through the partner point.

Schematic of the connections between the top and bottom surface of a crystal — New research from Princeton University demonstrates the bizarre movement of electrons through a novel material called a Weyl semi-metal. The image shows a schematic of the connections at special values of electron momentum, which come in pairs and are called Weyl points (red and blue dots). An electron that leaves the surface on a red point can return through its partner blue point, and vice versa. This bizarre behavior is due to the “topological” connections through the bulk of the material. Image credit: Yazdani et al., Princeton University.

The team decided to explore the behavior of these electrons following research, published in Science last year by another Princeton team and separately by two independent groups, revealing that electrons in Weyl semi-metals are quite unusual. For example, their experiments implied that while most surface electrons create a wave pattern that resembles the spreading rings that ripple out when a stone is thrown into a pond, the surface electrons in the new materials should make only a half circle, earning them the name “Fermi arcs.”

To get a more direct look at the patterns of electron flow in Weyl semi-metals, postdoctoral researcher Hiroyuki Inoue and graduate student András Gyenis in Yazdani’s lab, with help from graduate student Seong Woo Oh, used a highly sensitive instrument called a scanning tunneling microscope, one of the few tools that can observe electron waves on a crystal surface.

They obtained the tantalum arsenide crystals from graduate student Shan Jiang and assistant professor Ni Ni at the University of California-Los Angeles.

The results were puzzling. “Some of the interference patterns that we expected to see were missing,” Yazdani said.

Comparison of experiment (left) to theory (right): The image on the left shows a pattern of waves imaged with scanning tunneling microscopy, revealing all the possible ways in which electrons can interfere with each other on the surface. This pattern is dictated by the connection of the surface electrons with the interior of the crystal, which is determined by the Weyl momentum of electrons, the special momentum when the electrons sink easily through the sample. The observed pattern closely matches the pattern predicted by theoretical calculations (right). Image credit: Yazdani et al., Princeton University.

To help explain the phenomenon, Yazdani consulted B. Andrei Bernevig, associate professor of physics at Princeton, who has expertise in the theory of topological materials and whose group was involved in the first predictions of Weyl semi-metals in a 2015 paper published in Physical Review X.

Bernevig, with help from postdoctoral researchers Jian Li and Zhijun Wang, realized that the observed pattern made sense if the electrons in these unusual materials were sinking into the bulk of the crystal. “Nobody had predicted that there would be signals of this type of transport from a scanning tunneling microscope, so it came as a bit of a surprise,” said Bernevig.

The next step, said Bernevig, is to look for the behavior in other crystals.

The research at Princeton was supported by the Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program (W911NF-12-1-0461), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of EPiQS initiative (GBMF4530), the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers programs through the Princeton Center for Complex Materials (DMR-1420541, NSF-DMR-1104612, NSF CAREER DMR-0952428), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation. This project was also made possible through use of the facilities at Princeton Nanoscale Microscopy Laboratory (ARO-W911NF-1-0262, ONR-N00014-14-1-0330, ONR-N00014-13-10661), the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences (DOE-BES) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Meso program (N6601-11-1-4110, LPS and ARO-W911NF-1-0606), and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton. Work at University of California–Los Angeles was supported by the DOE-BES (DE-SC0011978).

Read the abstract.

The article, “Quasiparticle interference of the Fermi arcs and surface-bulk connectivity of a Weyl semimetal,” by Hiroyuki Inoue, András Gyenis, Zhijun Wang, Jian Li, Seong Woo Oh, Shan Jiang, Ni Ni, B. Andrei Bernevig,and Ali Yazdani, was published in the March 11, 2016 issue of the journal Science.

‘Material universe’ yields surprising new particle (Nature)

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Catherine Zandonella

By Staff

An international team of researchers has predicted the existence of a new type of particle called the type-II Weyl fermion in metallic materials. When subjected to a magnetic field, the materials containing the particle act as insulators for current applied in some directions and as conductors for current applied in other directions. This behavior suggests a range of potential applications, from low-energy devices to efficient transistors.

The researchers theorize that the particle exists in a material known as tungsten ditelluride (WTe2), which the researchers liken to a “material universe” because it contains several particles, some of which exist under normal conditions in our universe and others that may exist only in these specialized types of crystals. The research appeared in the journal Nature this week.

The new particle is a cousin of the Weyl fermion, one of the particles in standard quantum field theory. However, the type-II particle exhibits very different responses to electromagnetic fields, being a near perfect conductor in some directions of the field and an insulator in others.

The research was led by Princeton University Associate Professor of Physics B. Andrei Bernevig, as well as Matthias Troyer and Alexey Soluyanov of ETH Zurich, and Xi Dai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics. The team included Postdoctoral Research Associates Zhijun Wang at Princeton and QuanSheng Wu at ETH Zurich, and graduate student Dominik Gresch at ETH Zurich.

The particle’s existence was missed by physicist Hermann Weyl during the initial development of quantum theory 85 years ago, say the researchers, because it violated a fundamental rule, called Lorentz symmetry, that does not apply in the materials where the new type of fermion arises.

Particles in our universe are described by relativistic quantum field theory, which combines quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Under this theory, solids are formed of atoms that consist of a nuclei surrounded by electrons. Because of the sheer number of electrons interacting with each other, it is not possible to solve exactly the problem of many-electron motion in solids using quantum mechanical theory.

Instead, our current knowledge of materials is derived from a simplified perspective where electrons in solids are described in terms of special non-interacting particles, called quasiparticles, that move in the effective field created by charged entities called ions and electrons. These quasiparticles, dubbed Bloch electrons, are also fermions.

Just as electrons are elementary particles in our universe, Bloch electrons can be considered the elementary particles of a solid. In other words, the crystal itself becomes a “universe,” with its own elementary particles.

In recent years, researchers have discovered that such a “material universe” can host all other particles of relativistic quantum field theory. Three of these quasiparticles, the Dirac, Majorana, and Weyl fermions, were discovered in such materials, despite the fact that the latter two had long been elusive in experiments, opening the path to simulate certain predictions of quantum field theory in relatively inexpensive and small-scale experiments carried out in these “condensed matter” crystals.

These crystals can be grown in the laboratory, so experiments can be done to look for the newly predicted fermion in WTe2 and another candidate material, molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2).

“One’s imagination can go further and wonder whether particles that are unknown to relativistic quantum field theory can arise in condensed matter,” said Bernevig. There is reason to believe they can, according to the researchers.

The universe described by quantum field theory is subject to the stringent constraint of a certain rule-set, or symmetry, known as Lorentz symmetry, which is characteristic of high-energy particles. However, Lorentz symmetry does not apply in condensed matter because typical electron velocities in solids are very small compared to the speed of light, making condensed matter physics an inherently low-energy theory.

“One may wonder,” Soluyanov said, “if it is possible that some material universes host non-relativistic ‘elementary’ particles that are not Lorentz-symmetric?”

This question was answered positively by the work of the international collaboration. The work started when Soluyanov and Dai were visiting Bernevig in Princeton in November 2014 and the discussion turned to strange unexpected behavior of certain metals in magnetic fields (Nature 514, 205-208, 2014, doi:10.1038/nature13763). This behavior had already been observed by experimentalists in some materials, but more work is needed to confirm it is linked to the new particle.

The researchers found that while relativistic theory only allows a single species of Weyl fermions to exist, in condensed matter solids two physically distinct Weyl fermions are possible. The standard type-I Weyl fermion has only two possible states in which it can reside at zero energy, similar to the states of an electron which can be either spin-up or spin-down. As such, the density of states at zero energy is zero, and the fermion is immune to many interesting thermodynamic effects. This Weyl fermion exists in relativistic field theory, and is the only one allowed if Lorentz invariance is preserved.

The newly predicted type-2 Weyl fermion has a thermodynamic number of states in which it can reside at zero energy – it has what is called a Fermi surface. Its Fermi surface is exotic, in that it appears along with touching points between electron and hole pockets. This endows the new fermion with a scale, a finite density of states, which breaks Lorentz symmetry.

Left: Allowed states for the standard type-I Weyl fermion. When energy is tuned from below, at zero energy, a pinch in the number of allowed states guarantees the absence of many-body phenomena such as superconductivity or ordering. Right: The newly discovered type-II Weyl fermion. At zero energy, a large number of allowed states are still available. This allows for the presence of superconductivity, magnetism, and pair-density wave phenomena. Credit B. Andrei Bernevig et al. — Left: Allowed states for the standard type-I Weyl fermion. When energy is tuned from below, at zero energy, a pinch in the number of allowed states guarantees the absence of many-body phenomena such as superconductivity or ordering.
Right: The newly discovered type-II Weyl fermion. At zero energy, a large number of allowed states are still available. This allows for the presence of superconductivity, magnetism, and pair-density wave phenomena.
Credit
B. Andrei Bernevig et al.

The discovery opens many new directions. Most normal metals exhibit an increase in resistivity when subject to magnetic fields, a known effect used in many current technologies. The recent prediction and experimental realization of standard type-I Weyl fermions in semimetals by two groups in Princeton and one group in IOP Beijing showed that the resistivity can actually decrease if the electric field is applied in the same direction as the magnetic field, an effect called negative longitudinal magnetoresistance. The new work shows that materials hosting a type-II Weyl fermion have mixed behavior: While for some directions of magnetic fields the resistivity increases just like in normal metals, for other directions of the fields, the resistivity can decrease like in the Weyl semimetals, offering possible technological applications.

“Even more intriguing is the perspective of finding more ‘elementary’ particles in other condensed matter systems,” the researchers say. “What kind of other particles can be hidden in the infinite variety of material universes? The large variety of emergent fermions in these materials has only begun to be unraveled.”

Researchers at Princeton University were supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Researchers at ETH Zurich were supported by Microsoft Research, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council. Xi Dai was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the 973 program of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The article, “Type II Weyl Semimetals,” by Alexey A. Soluyanov, Dominik Gresch, Zhijun Wang, QuanSheng Wu, Matthias Troyer, Xi Dai, and B. Andrei Bernevig was published in the journal Nature on November 26, 2015.

Read the abstract.

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share: