In a new study published in Science Advances this week, an international team of scientists from the USA, Columbia, Czech Republic, England, and led by Dr. Mazhar N. Ali at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany, has shown that a new material, KV3Sb5, has a never-seen-before combination of properties that results in one of the largest anomalous Hall effects (AHEs) ever observed; 15,500 siemens per centimeter at 2 Kelvin.

Discovered in the lab of co-author Prof. Tyrel McQueen at Johns Hopkins University, KV3Sb5 combines four properties into one material: Dirac physics, metallic frustrated magnetism, 2D exfoliability (like graphene), and chemical stability.

Dirac physics, in this context, relates to the fact that the electrons in KV3Sb5 aren’t just your normal run-of-the-mill electrons; they are moving extremely fast with very low effective mass. This means that they are acting “light-like”; their velocities are becoming comparable to the speed of light and they are behaving as though they have only a small fraction of the mass which they should have. This results in the material being highly metallic and was first shown in graphene about 15 years ago.

The “frustrated magnetism” arises when the magnetic moments in a material (imagine little bar magnets which try to turn each other and line up North to South when you bring them together) are arranged in special geometries, like triangular nets. This scenario can make it hard for the bar magnets to line up in way that they all cancel each other out and are stable. Materials exhibiting this property are rare, especially metallic ones. Most frustrated magnet materials are electrical insulators, meaning that their electrons are immobile. “Metallic frustrated magnets have been highly sought after for several decades. They have been predicted to house unconventional superconductivity, Majorana fermions, be useful for quantum computing, and more,” commented Dr. Ali.

Structurally, KV3Sb5 has a 2D, layered structure where triangular vanadium and antimony layers loosely stack on top of potassium layers. This allowed the authors to simply use tape to peel off a few layers (a.k.a. flakes) at a time. “This was very important because it allowed us to use electron-beam lithography (like photo-lithography which is used to make computer chips, but using electrons rather than photons) to make tiny devices out of the flakes and measure properties which people can’t easily measure in bulk.” remarked lead author Shuo-Ying Yang, from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics. “We were excited to find that the flakes were quite stable to the fabrication process, which makes it relatively easy to work with and explore lots of properties.”

Armed with this combination of properties, the team first chose to look for an anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in the material. This phenomenon is where electrons in a material with an applied electric field (but no magnetic field) can get deflected by 90 degrees by various mechanisms. “It had been theorized that metals with triangular spin arrangements could host a significant extrinsic effect, so it was a good place to start,” noted Yang. Using angle resolved photoelectron spectroscopy, microdevice fabrication, and a low temperature electronic property measurement system, Shuo-Ying and co-lead author Yaojia Wang (Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics) were able to observe one of the largest AHE’s ever seen.

The AHE can be broken into two general categories: intrinsic and extrinsic. “The intrinsic mechanism is like if a football player made a pass to their teammate by bending the ball, or electron, around some defenders (without it colliding with them),” explained Ali. “Extrinsic is like the ball bouncing off of a defender, or magnetic scattering center, and going to the side after the collision. Many extrinsically dominated materials have a random arrangement of defenders on the field, or magnetic scattering centers randomly diluted throughout the crystal. KV3Sb5 is special in that it has groups of 3 magnetic scattering centers arranged in a triangular net. In this scenario, the ball scatters off of the cluster of defenders, rather than a single one, and is more likely to go to the side than if just one was in the way.” This is essentially the theorized spin-cluster skew scattering AHE mechanism which was demonstrated by the authors in this material. “However the condition with which the incoming ball hits the cluster seems to matter; you or I kicking the ball isn’t the same as if, say, Christiano Ronaldo kicked the ball,” added Ali. “When Ronaldo kicks it, it is moving way faster and bounces off of the cluster with way more velocity, moving to the side faster than if just any average person had kicked it. This is, loosely speaking, the difference between the Dirac quasiparticles (Ronaldo) in this material vs normal electrons (average person) and is related to why we see such a large AHE,” Ali laughingly explained.

These results may also help scientists identify other materials with this combination of ingredients. “Importantly, the same physics governing this AHE could also drive a very large spin Hall effect (SHE) — where instead of generating an orthogonal charge current, an orthogonal spin current is generated,” remarked Wang. “This is important for next-generation computing technologies based on an electron’s spin rather than its charge.”

“This is a new playground material for us: metallic Dirac physics, frustrated magnetism, exfoliatable, and chemically stable all in one. There is a lot of opportunity to explore fun, weird phenomena, like unconventional superconductivity and more,” said Ali, excitedly.

More than three hundred years after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used one of the earliest microscopes to describe human sperm as having a “tail, which, when swimming, lashes with a snakelike movement, like eels in water,” scientists have revealed this is an optical illusion.

Using state-of-the-art 3D microscopy and mathematics, Dr Hermes Gadelha from the University of Bristol, Dr Gabriel Corkidi and Dr Alberto Darszon from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, have pioneered the reconstruction of the true movement of the sperm tail in 3D.

Using a high-speed camera capable of recording over 55,000 frames in one second, and a microscope stage with a piezoelectric device to move the sample up and down at an incredibly high rate, they were able to scan the sperm swimming freely in 3D.

The ground-breaking study, published in the journal Science Advances, reveals the sperm tail is in fact wonky and only wiggles on one side. While this should mean the sperm’s one-sided stroke would have it swimming in circles, sperm have found a clever way to adapt and swim forwards.

“Human sperm figured out if they roll as they swim, much like playful otters corkscrewing through water, their one-sided stoke would average itself out, and they would swim forwards,” said Dr Gadelha, head of the Polymaths Laboratory at Bristol’s Department of Engineering Mathematics and an expert in the mathematics of fertility.

“The sperms’ rapid and highly synchronised spinning causes an illusion when seen from above with 2D microscopes — the tail appears to have a side-to-side symmetric movement, “like eels in water,” as described by Leeuwenhoek in the 17th century.

“However, our discovery shows sperm have developed a swimming technique to compensate for their lop-sidedness and in doing so have ingeniously solved a mathematical puzzle at a microscopic scale: by creating symmetry out of asymmetry,” said Dr Gadelha.

“The otter-like spinning of human sperm is however complex: the sperm head spins at the same time that the sperm tail rotates around the swimming direction. This is known in physics as precession, much like when the orbits of Earth and Mars precess around the sun.”

Computer-assisted semen analysis systems in use today, both in clinics and for research, still use 2D views to look at sperm movement. Therefore, like Leeuwenhoek’s first microscope, they are still prone to this illusion of symmetry while assessing semen quality. This discovery, with its novel use of 3D microscope technology combined with mathematics, may provide fresh hope for unlocking the secrets of human reproduction.

“With over half of infertility caused by male factors, understanding the human sperm tail is fundamental to developing future diagnostic tools to identify unhealthy sperm,” adds Dr Gadelha, whose work has previously revealed the biomechanics of sperm bendiness and the precise rhythmic tendencies that characterise how a sperm moves forward.

Dr Corkidi and Dr Darszon pioneered the 3D microscopy for sperm swimming.

“This was an incredible surprise, and we believe our state-of the-art 3D microscope will unveil many more hidden secrets in nature. One day this technology will become available to clinical centres,” said Dr Corkidi.

“This discovery will revolutionize our understanding of sperm motility and its impact on natural fertilization. So little is known about the intricate environment inside the female reproductive tract and how sperm swimming impinge on fertilization. These new tools open our eyes to the amazing capabilities sperm have,” said Dr Darszon.

This is the conclusion of a study led by UC Riverside astrobiologist Stephen Kane published this week in the Astronomical Journal.

The search for life in outer space is typically focused on what scientists call the “habitable zone,” which is the area around a star in which an orbiting planet could have liquid water oceans — a condition for life as we know it.

Kane had been studying a nearby solar system called Trappist-1, which has three Earth-like planets in its habitable zone.

“This made me wonder about the maximum number of habitable planets it’s possible for a star to have, and why our star only has one,” Kane said. “It didn’t seem fair!”

His team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with each other over millions of years.

They found it is possible for some stars to support as many as seven, and that a star like our sun could potentially support six planets with liquid water.

“More than seven, and the planets become too close to each other and destabilize each other’s orbits,” Kane said.

Why then does our solar system only have one habitable planet if it is capable of supporting six? It helps if the planets’ movement is circular rather than oval or irregular, minimizing any close contact and maintain stable orbits.

Kane also suspects Jupiter, which has a mass two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined, limited our system’s habitability.

“It has a big effect on the habitability of our solar system because it’s massive and disturbs other orbits,” Kane said.

Only a handful of stars are known to have multiple planets in their habitable zones. Moving forward, Kane plans to search for additional stars surrounded entirely by smaller planets. These stars will be prime targets for direct imaging with NASA telescopes like the one at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Habitable Exoplanet Observatory.

Kane’s study identified one such star, Beta CVn, which is relatively close by at 27 light years away. Because it doesn’t have a Jupiter-like planet, it will be included as one of the stars checked for multiple habitable zone planets.

Future studies will also involve the creation of new models that examine the atmospheric chemistry of habitable zone planets in other star systems.

Projects like these offer more than new avenues in the search for life in outer space. They also offer scientists insight into forces that might change life on our own planet one day.

“Although we know Earth has been habitable for most of its history, many questions remain regarding how these favorable conditions evolved with time, and the specific drivers behind those changes,” Kane said. “By measuring the properties of exoplanets whose evolutionary pathways may be similar to our own, we gain a preview into the past and future of this planet — and what we must do to main its habitability.”

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Materials provided by University of California – Riverside. Original written by Jules Bernstein. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.