Quest for novel quantum materials ‘opens new chapter’

Technology News | August 28, 2019

By Rich Pell

IoT Materials & processes Power Management Test and Measurement

The three-year effort, say the researchers, will leverage world-class expertise and facilities, and open a new chapter of quantum matter exploration, with potential benefits including the following:

Superfast quantum computers immune to hacking
Cheap energy created from fusion and delivered over superconducting wires.
A more secure stockpile of nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
A better understanding of how planets and other astronomical bodies form – and even whether some might be habitable.

Until recently, say the researchers, many of the quantum behaviors and properties of subatomic particles could be observed only at extremely low, cryogenic temperatures. At low temperatures, the wave-like behavior causes electrons, put simply, “to overlap, become more social and talk more to their neighbors all while occupying discrete states.” This quantum behavior allows them to transmit energy and can result in superconductive materials.

“The new realization is that you can achieve the same type of ‘quantumness’ of particles if you compress them really, really tightly,” says Mohamed Zaghoo, a Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) scientist and project team member.

This can be achieved in various ways, from blasting the materials with powerful, picoseconds laser bursts to slowly compressing them for days, even months between super-hard industrial diamonds in nanoscale “anvils” (see image).

“Now you can say these materials can only exist under really high pressures, so to duplicate that under normal conditions is still a challenge,” says Zaghoo. “But if we are able to understand why materials acquire these exotic behaviors at really high pressures, maybe we can tweak the parameters, and design materials that have these same quantum properties at both higher temperatures and lower pressures. We also hope to build a predictive theory about why and how certain kinds of elements can have these quantum properties and others don’t.”

For example, the common metal aluminum not only becomes transparent, but also loses its ability to conduct energy at extremely high pressure. If it happens to aluminum, it’s likely it will happen with other metals as well, say the researchers.

Semiconductor chips and transistors rely on metallic oxides to serve as insulating layers, so the ability to use high pressure to “uniquely tune” the quantum properties of various metals could lead to “new types of oxides, new types of conductors that make the circuits much more efficient, and lose less heat,” says Zaghoo, “We would be able to design better electronics.”

In addition to creating new materials, a major thrust of the project is to be able to describe and explore those materials in meaningful ways.

“The instrumentation and diagnostics are not there yet,” says Zaghoo. So, part of the proposal is to develop new techniques to “look at these materials and actually see something of substance.”

The project also includes researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Buffalo, the University of Utah, and Howard University and collaborators at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh.