Topic
Materials whose electronic, magnetic, or superconducting properties arise from collective quantum effects, including 2D and layered compounds.
University of Twente researchers built a SQUID sensor on a silicon pyramid tip that still works above 1 tesla, about 20,000 times Earth's field. Etching the tip from silicon could let labs make these sensors in batches instead of by hand.
Reality
In PNAS, Kyle Shen's Cornell group dosed thin films with cesium and measured them without regrowing the sample, and the dome tracked imperfections in the crystal lattice more closely than the electron count.
Reality
Screening the Coulomb interaction killed superconductivity in magic-angle graphene outright, which is strong evidence that the electrons do the pairing. It killed the correlated insulators too, narrowing the mechanism debate but not settling it.
Reality
Rice, Minnesota and Paul Scherrer researchers report spin textures consistent with unconventional magnetism in ruthenium dioxide films a few atomic layers thick, and only when the lattice is strained, which makes strain a candidate control knob.
Reality
Researchers report the first case of engineered vacuum fluctuations raising NbSe2's transition temperature. The gain is small; the frequency dependence is the part worth arguing about.
Reality
MIT physicists report that two charge density waves in erbium tritelluride form by different mechanisms: one gradual, one nucleating in expanding pockets. Coexisting phases are not one knob.
Reality
A group reports in Nature Physics that selenium core-level dynamics in 1T-TiSe2 speed up with laser fluence. The result that matters is the assay, not a verdict on excitonic insulators.
Reality