This approach could lead to new materials with emergent physics and unique electronic properties, supporting broader research efforts to revolutionize modern electronics.
When atoms or molecules assemble to form bulk matter, new properties (such as conductivity and ferromagnetism) that didn’t exist in the constituent parts can emerge from the whole. Similarly, stacking atomically thin layers into nanostructures (heterostructures) can give rise to a rich variety of emergent phases not found in bulk materials.
Materials that exhibit emergent phenomena (“quantum materials”) often feature multiple phases with simultaneous phase transitions. A great deal of effort is currently being expended to disentangle such transitions, to discover what drives them and to ultimately harness them in new materials with desired functionalities. Most of these efforts have relied on external perturbations (light, pressure, etc.) to decouple the transitions. In this work, researchers found a way to do this intrinsically, through layer-by-layer design of stacking sequences with mismatched periodicities.
>Read more on the Advanced Light Source website
Image: (a) Rare-earth (RE) nickelates (RENiO3) host multiple types of entangled orderings. This illustration depicts a magnetic ordering (spin directions indicated by yellow arrows) and a charge ordering (a checkerboard of two nickel oxidation states, indicated by sphere size and color) in bulk RENiO3 (RE and O atoms omitted for clarity).
Please find the entire image here.