Posted Jan 19, 2021 10:18 am This illustration shows light at trillions of pulses per second (red flash) accessing and controlling Higgs modes (gold balls) in an iron-based superconductor. Even at different energy bands, the Higgs modes interact with each other (white smoke). Larger image.
Illustration courtesy of Jigang Wang. AMES, Iowa – Even if you weren’t a physics major, you’ve probably heard something about the Higgs boson. There was the title of a 1993 book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that dubbed the Higgs “The God Particle.” There was the search for the Higgs particle that launched after 2009’s first collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. There was the 2013 announcement that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently theorizing in 1964 that a fundamental particle – the Higgs – is the source of mass in subatomic particles, making the universe as we know it possible.
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This news release, written by Laura Millsaps at Ames Laboratory, is being jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Brookhaven Lab media contacts: Ariana Manglaviti, 631-344-2347, amanglaviti@bnl.gov or Peter Genzer, 631-344-3174, genzer@bnl.gov; Ames Lab media contact: Laura Millsaps, 515-294-3474, millsaps@ameslab.gov.
Light-induced Twisting of Weyl Nodes Switches on Giant Electron Current
January 18, 2021
Collaborating scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy s Ames Laboratory, Brookhaven Laboratory and the University of Alabama Birmingham used laser pulses to twist the crystal lattice of a Weyl semimetal, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery and control of such properties brings these materials another step closer to use in applications such as quantum computing.