Quanta Magazine

Paradoxical Crystal Baffles Physicists

At super-low temperatures, a crystal called samarium hexaboride behaves in an unexplained,
imagination-stretching way.

Andrew Testa for Quanta Magazine

Interactions between electrons inside samarium hexaboride appear to be giving rise to an exotic quantum
behavior new to researchers.

By Natalie Wolchover

In a deceptively drab black crystal, physicists have stumbled upon a baffling behavior, one that
appears to blur the line between the properties of metals, in which electrons flow freely, and those
of insulators, in which electrons are effectively stuck in place. The crystal exhibits hallmarks of both
simultaneously.

“This is a big shock,” said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter physicist at the University of
Cambridge whose findings appeared today in an advance online edition of the journal Science.
Insulators and metals are essentially opposites, she said. “But somehow, it’s a material that’s both.
It’s contrary to everything that we know.”

The material, a much-studied compound called samarium hexaboride or SmB6, is an insulator at very
low temperatures, meaning it resists the flow of electricity. Its resistance implies that electrons (the
building blocks of electric currents) cannot move through the crystal more than an atom’s width in
any direction. And yet, Sebastian and her collaborators observed electrons traversing orbits millions
of atoms in diameter inside the crystal in response to a magnetic field — a mobility that is only

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expected in materials that conduct electricity. Calling to mind the famous wave-particle duality of
quantum mechanics, the new evidence suggests SmB6 might be neither a textbook metal nor an
insulator, Sebastian said, but “something more complicated that we don’t know how to imagine.”

Courtesy of Suchitra Sebastian

Suchitra Sebastian, an experimental condensed matter

physicist at the University of Cambridge, said the
discoveries she and her colleagues have made “mean
that something needs to be rewritten completely.”

“It is just a magnificent paradox,” said Jan Zaanen, a condensed matter theorist at Leiden University
in the Netherlands. “On the basis of established wisdoms this cannot possibly happen, and
henceforth completely new physics should be at work.”

It is too soon to tell what, if anything, this “new physics” will be good for, but physicists like Victor
Galitski, of the University of Maryland, College Park, say it is well worth the effort to find out.
“Oftentimes,” he said, “big discoveries are really puzzling things, like superconductivity.” That
phenomenon, discovered in 1911, took nearly half a century to understand, and it now generates the
world’s most powerful magnets, such as those that accelerate particles through the 17-mile tunnel of
the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Theorists have already begun to venture guesses as to what might be going on inside SmB6. One
promising approach models the material as a higher-dimensional black hole. But no theory yet
captures the whole story. “I do not think that there is any remotely credible hypothesis proposed at
this moment in time,” Zaanen said.

SmB6 has resisted classification since Soviet scientists first studied its properties in the early 1960s,
followed by better-known experiments at Bell Labs.

Counting up the electrons in the orbital shells that surround its samarium and boron nuclei indicates
that roughly half an electron should be left over, on average, per samarium nucleus (a fraction,
because the nuclei have “mixed valence,” or alternating numbers of orbiting electrons). These
“conduction electrons” should flow through the material like water flowing through a pipe, and thus,
SmB6 should be a metal. “That’s the idea people had back when I started working on this problem as
a young guy, around 1975,” said Jim Allen, an experimental physicist at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor who has studied SmB6 on and off since then.

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But while samarium hexaboride does conduct electricity at room temperature, things get strange as
it cools. The crystal is what physicists call a “strongly correlated” material; its electrons acutely feel
one another’s effects, causing them to lock together into an emergent, collective behavior. Whereas
strong correlations in certain superconductors cause the electrical resistance to drop to zero at low
temperatures, in the case of SmB6, the electrons seem to gum up when cooled, and the material
behaves as an insulator.

The effect stems from the 5.5 electrons, on average,

that occupy an uncomfortably tight shell encasing
each samarium nucleus. These close-knit electrons
mutually repel one another, and “that essentially
tells the electrons, ‘Don’t move around,’” Allen
explained. The last half electron trapped in each of
these shells has a complex relationship with its
other, freer, conducting half. Below minus 223
degrees Celsius, the conduction electrons in SmB6
are thought to “hybridize” with these trapped
electrons, forming a new, hybrid orbit around the
samarium nuclei. Experts initially believed the
crystal turns into an insulator because none of the
electrons in this hybrid orbit can move.

“The resistivity shows it’s an insulator;

Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine. Source: Min-Feng
The crystal structure of samarium hexaboride, or
SmB6.
photoemission shows it’s a good insulator; optical
absorption shows it’s a good insulator; neutron
scattering shows it’s an insulator,” said Lu Li, a
condensed matter physicist at the University of
Michigan whose experimental group also studies
SmB6.

But this is no garden-variety insulator. Not only does its insulating behavior arise from strong
correlations between its electrons, but in the past five years, mounting evidence has suggested that
it is a “topological insulator” at low temperatures, a material that resists the flow of electricity
through its three-dimensional bulk, while conducting electricity along its two-dimensional surfaces.
Topological insulators have become one of the hottest topics in condensed matter physics since their
2007 discovery because of their potential use in quantum computers and other novel devices. And
yet, SmB6 does not neatly fit that category either.

Early last year, hoping to add to the evidence that SmB6 is a topological insulator, Sebastian and her
student Beng Tan visited the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, or MagLab, at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico and attempted to measure wavelike undulations called
“quantum oscillations” in the electrical resistance of their crystal samples. The rate of quantum
oscillations and how they vary as the sample is rotated can be used to map out the “Fermi surface”
of the crystal, a signature property “which is sort of the geometry of how the electrons flow through
the material,” Sebastian explained.

Sebastian and Tan didn’t see any quantum oscillations in New Mexico, however. Scrambling to
salvage Tan’s doctoral project, they measured a less interesting property instead, and, to check
these results, booked time at another MagLab location, in Tallahassee, Fla.

In Florida, Sebastian and Tan noticed that their measurement probe had an extra slot with a diving-

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board-style cantilever on it, which could be used to measure quantum oscillations in the
magnetization of their crystals. After failing to see quantum oscillations in the electrical resistance,
they hadn’t planned on looking for them in a different material property — but why not? “I was
thinking, fine, let’s stick a sample on,” Sebastian said. They cooled down their samples, turned on
the magnetic field, and started measuring. Suddenly they realized the signal coming from the diving
board was oscillating.

“We were like, wait — what?” she said.

In that experiment and subsequent ones at MagLab, they measured quantum oscillations deep in the
interior of their crystal samples. The data translated into a huge, three-dimensional Fermi surface,
representing electrons circulating throughout the material in the presence of the magnetic field, as
conduction electrons do in a metal. Judging by its Fermi surface, electrons in the interior of SmB6
travel 1 million times farther than its electrical resistance would suggest is possible.

“The Fermi surface is like that in copper; it’s like that in silver; it’s like that in gold,” said Li, whose
group reported surface-level quantum oscillations in Science in December. “Not just metals… these
are very good metals.”

Somehow, at low temperatures and in the presence of a magnetic field, the strongly correlated
electrons in SmB6 can move like those in the most conductive metals, even though they cannot
conduct electricity. How can the crystal behave like both a metal and an insulator?

Courtesy of Geetha Balakrishnan

The ultra-pure SmB6 crystals used in the new

experiments were grown in an optical furnace heated
to 3,000 degrees Celsius at the University of Warwick
in England.

Contamination of the samples might seem likely, if not for another surprising discovery: Not only did
Sebastian, Tan and their collaborators find quantum oscillations in an insulator, but the form of the
oscillations — namely, how quickly they grew in amplitude as the temperature decreased — greatly
diverged from the predictions of a universal formula for conventional metals. Every metal ever

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tested has conformed to this Lifshitz-Kosevich formula (named for Arnold Kosevich and Evgeny
Lifshitz), suggesting that the quantum oscillations in SmB6 come from an entirely new physical
phenomenon. “If it were coming from something trivial, like inclusions of some other materials, it
would have followed the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula,” Galitski said. “So I think it’s a real effect.”

Amazingly, the observed deviation from the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula was presaged in 2010 by Sean
Hartnoll and Diego Hofman, both then at Harvard University, in a paper that recast strongly
correlated materials as higher-dimensional black holes, those infinitely steep curves in space-time
predicted by Albert Einstein. In their paper, Hartnoll and Hofman investigated the effect of strong
correlations in metals by calculating corresponding properties of their simpler black hole model —
specifically, how long an electron could orbit the black hole before falling in. “I had calculated what
would replace this Lifshitz-Kosevich formula in more exotic metals,” said Hartnoll, who is now at
Stanford University. “And indeed it seems that the form [Sebastian] has found can be matched with
this formula that I derived.”

This generalized Lifshitz-Kosevich formula holds for a class of metallike states of matter that
includes conventional metals, Hartnoll says. But even if SmB6 is another member of this “generalized
metal” class, this still does not explain why it acts as an insulator. Other theorists are attempting to
model the material with more traditional mathematical machinery. Some say its electrons may be
rapidly vacillating between insulating and conducting states in some novel quantum fashion.

Theorists are busy theorizing, and Li and his collaborators are preparing to try and replicate
Sebastian’s results with their own samples of SmB6. The chance discovery in Florida was only the
first step. Now to resolve the paradox.

This article was reprinted on Wired.com.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150702-paradoxical-crystal-baffles-physicists/ July 2, 2015