Research on Covid-19

The progressive hydrostatic compression of I2 and I3- units in an organic salt lead to a homoatomic polymeric chain. As the I---I distance collapses the covalent character of the interaction becomes more relevant, leading to a pressure-tunable increased conductivity.

Elementary excitations in condensed matter capture the complex many-body dynamics of interacting basic entities in a simple quasiparticle picture. In magnetic systems the most established quasiparticles are magnons, collective excitations that reside in ordered spin structures, and spinons, their fractional counterparts that emerge in disordered, yet correlated spin states.

Researchers at NCCR MARVEL have combined first principles calculations with soft X-ray angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to examine tungsten diphosphide’s electronic structure, characterizing its Weyl nodes for the very first time. In agreement with density functional theory calculations, the results revealed two pairs of Weyl nodes lying at different binding energies. The observation of the Weyl nodes, as well as the tilted cone-like dispersions in the vicinity of the nodal points, provides compelling evidence that the material is a robust type-II Weyl semimetal with broken Lorentz invariance. This is as MARVEL researchers predicted two years ago. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters as an Editor's Suggestion.

We report on magnetization M(H), dc and ac magnetic susceptibility Χ(T), specific heat C_m(T) and muon spin relaxation (μSR) measurements of the Kitaev honeycomb iridate Cu₂IrO₃ with quenched disorder. In spite of the chemical disorders, we find no indication of spin glass down to 260 mK from the C_m(T) and μSR data.

Plenary Session Featuring The Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureship in Materials Science:

Tuesday, April 23

8:15 am – 9:30 am

PCC North, 100 Level, Ballroom 120 D

SIM beamline scientist Carlos Vaz was recognized as outstanding referee for providing high quality peer review for the Journal of Materials Chemistry C (Royal Society of Chemistry).

Lithography‐like writing of conducting regions at the interface between SrTiO₃ and amorphous Si using X‐ray irradiation opens ways for spatially controlled functionalities in oxide heterostructures.

Water is a ubiquitous liquid with unique physicochemical properties, whose nature has shaped our planet and life as we know it. Water in restricted geometries has different properties than in bulk. Confinement can prevent low-temperature crystalliza- tion of the molecules into a hexagonal structure and thus create a state of amorphous water. To understand the survival of life at subzero temperatures, it is essential to elucidate this behaviour in the presence of nanoconfining lipidic membranes.

Direct manipulation of the atomic lattice using intense long-wavelength laser pulses has become a viable approach to create new states of matter in complex materials. Conventionally, a high-frequency vibrational mode is driven resonantly by a mid-infrared laser pulse and the lattice structure is modified through indirect coupling of this infrared-active phonon to other, lower-frequency lattice modulations.

In the week of April 1-5 PSI welcomes 20 PhD students and postdocs taking part in the European HERCULES 2019 school on Neutron and Synchrotron Radiation. They will attend lectures and perform two days of practical courses at several beam lines of the Swiss Light Source.

Magnetically coupled nanomagnets have multiple applications in nonvolatile memories, logic gates, and sensors. The most effective couplings have been found to occur between the magnetic layers in a vertical stack. We achieved strong coupling of laterally adjacent nanomagnets using the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. This coupling is mediated by chiral domain walls between out-of-plane and in-plane magnetic regions and dominates the behavior of nanomagnets below a critical size.