The hardness of a material normally is set by the strength of chemical bonds between electrons of neighboring atoms, not by freely flowing conduction electrons. Now a team of scientists has shown that ...

An Australian-led study uses a scanning-tunnelling microscope ‘trick’ to map electronic structure in Na 3 Bi, seeking an answer to that material’s extremely high electron mobility. In studying the ...

Figure 1: The wall between two magnetic domains (red and blue) creates chiral edge states that act as channels to carry electrons with no loss of energy. (© AAAS) The researchers’ work relies on a ...

A model describing spin-dependent conduction in metals underpins modern magnetic technologies. Magnetotransport under the fundamental conditions of this model has now been probed experimentally. You ...

Physicists have performed computer simulations that show how electrons become one thousand times more massive in certain metal compounds when cooled to temperatures near absolute zero. The models may ...

Modern high-density magnetic memories such as hard disk drives and magnetoresistive random access memories feature magnetic bits with a size of only a few magnetic grains (see, for example, ref. 1).

The hardness of materials is determined by the strength of the chemical bonds that are formed between the electrons of the neighbouring atoms. For example, the bonds in diamond are very strong, so it ...