A huge leap in the complexity of life happened around 2. 6 billion years ago. This is when eukaryotic cells first appeared. These cells are the building blocks of plants, animals, and fungi. They are way more complex than the simpler prokaryotic cells that came before them. The journey to this big change was not straightforward. Scientists have been trying to figure...
Imagine a material that can stretch and shrink dramatically with just a bit of heat. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, right? Well, scientists have found a crystal that does just that. This isn't your average crystal. It's made from a special type of dibenzothiophene sulfone. When it gets hot, it goes through something called a phase transition. T...
Imagine a material that can change its structure just by being zapped with plasma. That's vanadium dioxide (VO2) in a nutshell. This stuff is a superstar in the world of nanoelectronics. It all starts with something called phase transition. Picture it like a superhero changing forms to save the day. In this case, VO2 shifts from one structure to another, and...
Have you ever wondered what happens when strange electric dipoles start to behave differently in mixed ferroelectrics? Imagine a bunch of these tiny electric dipoles spread out randomly across a material. Each one is like a tiny magnet but with electric fields instead of magnetic fields. Scientists worked to figure out how these dipoles affect the way the material ch...
Imagine a material that can switch between two magnetic states, like flipping a switch. This happens when the material gets hotter, and scientists call this the Curie temperature. Understanding this switch is tricky because it happens on tiny scales that conventional tools can't easily see. In this study, scientists used a special tool called a scanning nitrogen-vaca...
Phase transitions, those fascinating transformations of matter, don't just happen in calm, static systems. They can occur in systems that are constantly on the move, too. These are called non-equilibrium systems. Think of a pot of boiling water, where water turns to steam—that's a phase transition in a non-equilibrium system. Scientists have been studying models tha...
Scientists have been excitedly studying topological states in two-dimensional systems that have magnetic properties. Why? Because they hold great potential for spintronics and nanotechnology. One of these materials is a two-dimensional ferromagnet called CrS 2 . It has something unique: multiple Weyl points (WPs). These are special spots where electrons behave in a...