ZURICH, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- An
international team of physicists, materials scientists and string
theoreticians have observed a phenomenon on Earth that was
previously thought to only occur hundreds of light years away
or at the time when the universe was born. This result could
lead to a more evidence-based model for the understanding the
universe and for improving the energy-conversion process in
electronic devices.
Using a recently discovered material called a Weyl semimetal,
similar to 3D graphene, scientists at IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) have
mimicked a gravitational field in their test sample by imposing a
temperature gradient. The study was supervised by Prof. Kornelius
Nielsch, Director at the Leibniz Institute for Materials and Solid
State Research Dresden (IFW) and Prof. Claudia Felser, Director at
the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in
Dresden.
After conducting the experiment in a cryolab at the University
of Hamburg with high magnetic fields, a team of theoreticians from
TU Dresden, UC Berkeley and the Instituto de Fisica Teorica
UAM/CSIC confirmed with detailed calculations that they observed a
quantum effect known as an axial-gravitational anomaly, which
breaks one of the classical conservation laws, such as charge,
energy and momentum.
This law-breaking anomaly had previously been derived in purely
theoretical reasoning with methods based on string theory. It was
believed to exist only at extremely high temperatures of trillions
of degrees, as an exotic form of matter, called a quark-gluon
plasma, at the early stages of the universe deep within the cosmos
or created using particle colliders. But to their surprise, the
researchers discovered that it also exists on Earth in the
properties of solid-state physics, on which much of the computing
industry is based on, spanning from tiny transistors to cloud data
centers. This discovery is appearing today in the peer-reviewed
journal Nature.
"For the first time, we have experimentally observed this
fundamental quantum anomaly on Earth which is extremely important
towards our understanding of the universe," said Dr. Johannes
Gooth, an IBM Research scientist and lead author of the paper. "We
can now build novel solid-state devices based on this anomaly that
have never been considered before to potentially circumvent some of
the problems inherent in classical electronic devices, such as
transistors."
"This is an incredibly exciting discovery. We can clearly
conclude that the same breaking of symmetry can be observed in any
physical system, whether it occurred at the beginning of the
universe or is happening today, right here on Earth," said Prof.
Dr. Karl Landsteiner, a string theorist at the Instituto de Fisica
Teorica UAM/CSIC and co-author of the paper.
IBM scientists predict this discovery will open up a rush of new
developments around sensors, switches and thermoelectric coolers or
energy-harvesting devices, for improved power consumption.
Read more at:
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/07/scientists-observe-gravitational-anomaly-on-earth/
Join the conversation on Twitter @IBMResearch and
#axialanomaly
Images are available at:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/ibm_research_zurich/6690Y4
This work was supported by the research grant DFG-RSF (NI616
22/1): Contribution of topological states to the thermoelectric
properties of Weyl semimetals and SFB 1143 as well as by the
Helmholtz association through VI-521 and the DFG (Emmy-Noether
programme) via grant ME 4844/1. Additional grants include:
SEV-2012-0249 and FPA2015-65480-P.
Experimental signatures of the mixed axial-gravitational
anomaly in the Weyl semimetal NbP, Johannes
Gooth, Anna C. Niemann, Tobias
Meng, Adolfo G. Grushin, Karl
Landsteiner, Bernd Gotsmann, Fabian
Menges, Marcus Schmidt, Chandra
Shekhar, Vicky Süß, Ruben
Hühne, Bernd Rellinghaus, Claudia
Felser, Binghai Yan, Kornelius Nielsch,
DOI: 10.1038/nature23005
About IBM Research
For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the
future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers
in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM
Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals
of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing
Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20
inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of
Fame.
For more information about IBM Research,
visit www.ibm.com/research.
Contacts:
Chris Sciacca
IBM
Research (EMEA)
+41 44 724
8443
cia@zurich.ibm.com
Christine Vu
IBM
Research (US)
1 (914)
945-2755
vuch@us.ibm.com
Susana Hernández
Instituto de Fisica Teorica UAM/CSIC
(+34) 91 299 9 -
879
susana.hernandez@csic.es
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SOURCE IBM