Physicists from the United States, Japan, and France have made a significant breakthrough by creating a new state of substance called the “boson correlated insulator.” This was possible due to the interaction of bosonal particles called excitons. This discovery could potentially lead to a new understanding of physics of the condensed state and the development of new bosal materials.
Typically, physicists study the behavior of fermions, particles such as electrons with semi-fingers. However, in this study, scientists focused on the interaction of bosons. Exitons are a state in which a negatively charged electron is associated with its positively charged opposite, forming a bosonary particle. These were the particles studied in this research.
To showcase this phenomenon, physicists used a complex structure of two layers of dyslenide of tungsten and disulfide of tungsten. These are two-dimensional materials with an atomic thickness, and by slightly turning one layer relative to the other, they created a muaric pattern – a periodic change in brightness on the surface. Within this pattern, the excitons formed a crystal lattice and demonstrated an unusual behavior where they became insulators instead of carrying out electricity. This means that the excitons correlated with each other and created a new state of substance.
Ruchen Ziong, a graduate student from the University of California in Santa Barbara and the main author of the article in the journal Science, said, “We found that under certain conditions, the excitons cease to carry out electricity and become insulators. This means that they correlate with each other and form a new state of substance.”
This effect was created for the first time in a “real” system made up of matter, not a synthetic one. Scientists are excited about this discovery, and they hope that this breakthrough will help to better understand the properties of plasma. Plasma is the fourth state of a substance, and it can potentially be used to create safe, pure, and effective nuclear energy generators on Earth.
The research has been published in the magazine Science.