A new study from a Moore Foundation grantee at Princeton University has revealed a unifying connection between seemingly unrelated materials that exhibit extreme magnetoresistance, the ability of some materials to drastically change their electrical resistance in response to a magnetic field, a property that could be useful in magnetic memory applications.
“The chemistry of these materials looks completely different but they’re connected on a profound level by their physics,” said Robert Cava, a materials synthesis investigator in the foundation's EPiQS initiative and professor of chemistry at Princeton.
Numerous materials with extreme magnetoresistance have been reported since the Cava lab first discovered extreme magnetoresistance in WTe2 two years ago.
In this new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Researchers in the Cava lab noticed that five materials with extreme magnetoresistance yet very different structures and chemical make-up all share the same characteristics when their resistance-temperature-applied-magnetic-field diagrams are measured.
This diagram maps the temperature and magnetic field strength at which the material’s magnetoresistance turns on and then saturates. Using the phase diagrams as a clue, scientists may be able to identify other materials with extreme magnetoresistance.
"Now we hope that other people will think about this, and make more measurements to see whether our proposal for the unifying physics holds up to more intense scrutiny," Cava said.
Read the full article here and watch an interview with Cava here.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.