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Quantum Matter Is Changing in Ways Scientists Never Saw Before · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quark Side Quantum Physics podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Right now, in that glass of ice water sitting on
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  Speaker 2: your desk, physics is doing something that is honestly.
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  Speaker 3: Kind of impossible.
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  Speaker 4: Oh yeah, completely right.
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  Speaker 2: Like two entirely different phases of matter are sharing the
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: exact same space without destroying each other. You have, the
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: solid ice and the liquid water are just coexisting.
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  Speaker 4: It's one of those things we see every day, so
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  Speaker 4: we completely ignore how profound it really is.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly, but think about this.
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  Speaker 2: What if we could force the electrons inside, say a
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  Speaker 2: computer chip to do that exact same thing thing. What
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  Speaker 2: if you could have completely different electronic phases overlapping in
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  Speaker 2: the same atomic space, you know, without one just overwriting
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  Speaker 2: the other.
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  Speaker 4: I mean that is pretty much the holy grail of
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  Speaker 4: condensed matter physics right there. Yeah, because we're so used
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  Speaker 4: to thinking of phases as mutually exclusive. Material is you know,
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  Speaker 4: either solid, a liquid.
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  Speaker 3: Or a gas, right or like a magnetic or non magnetic.
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  Speaker 4: Exactly, But when you zoom way way down to the
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  Speaker 4: quantum scale, those strict boundaries just start to blur and
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  Speaker 4: you get these highly exotic states where electrons are essentially
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  Speaker 4: well living double lives.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this, because going from a simple glass
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  Speaker 2: of ice water to quantum electronics requires looking at a
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  Speaker 2: decade's old debate in physics.
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  Speaker 4: It really does.
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  Speaker 2: For years, material scientists have been wrestling with materials that
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  Speaker 2: exhibit multiple quantum states simultaneously, right.
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  Speaker 4: And what's fascinating here is that in a highly complex
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  Speaker 4: quantum materials take your high temperature corporate superconductors, for instance,
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  Speaker 4: you don't just have one clear phase. You have magnetism,
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  Speaker 4: you have super conductivity, and you have these strange periodic
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  Speaker 4: structural phases all just crammed into the exact same atomic.
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  Speaker 3: Lattice, just all happening at once.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. And for the longest time, the debate in the
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  Speaker 4: physics community has been fundamentally about real estate.
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  Speaker 3: Real estate.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, do these phases aggressively compete for the same electrons,
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  Speaker 4: do they somehow reinforce one another, or do they manage
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  Speaker 4: to just you know, completely ignore each other and coexist
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  Speaker 4: on parallel tracks?
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  Speaker 2: But I mean, you might be wondering, how do you
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  Speaker 2: even begin to look at something that tiny and that complex, right.
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  Speaker 4: Because observation is the immediate problem.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, you're looking at something on the scale of an electron,
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  Speaker 2: and things are moving in fractions of a femtosecond. How
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  Speaker 2: do you even freeze that action to observe whether they
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  Speaker 2: are competing or cooperating. You can't exactly just put it
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  Speaker 2: under a standard microscope.
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  Speaker 4: No, you really can't, because a standard microscope uses visible light,
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  Speaker 4: and well, the wavelength of visible light is massive compared
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: to the atomic structures we are trying to look at.
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  Speaker 2: It's like using a yard stick to measure a bacteria exactly.
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  Speaker 4: So to understand how researchers are actually solving this mystery
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  Speaker 4: of coexisting phases, we have to isolate the phenomenon. We
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  Speaker 4: have to strip away the noise of something as messy
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  Speaker 4: as a high temperature superconductor.
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  Speaker 3: Right, simplify the environment.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, look at the phases themselves in a much more
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  Speaker 4: controlled setting, and that brings us to charge density waves
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  Speaker 4: or CDWs.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so charge density waves usually we think of electron
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  Speaker 2: repulsion preventing any kind of tight coordination, right, like the
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  Speaker 2: kulum force dictates that negative charges.
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  Speaker 4: Repel each other jasic physics.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah so unless we're talking about you know, Cooper pairs
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  Speaker 2: in super conductivity, where electrons find a bizarre way to
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  Speaker 2: bind together. Why are they bunching up into a wave.
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  Speaker 4: Here, Well, it really comes down to the underlying architecture
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  Speaker 4: of the material. The electrons aren't acting in a vacuum, right.
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  Speaker 4: They are moving through a grid.
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  Speaker 3: Of atoms, the atomic lattice exactly.
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  Speaker 4: And in certain materials, when you cool them down significantly,
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  Speaker 4: the electrons couple with the vibrations of that atomic lattice
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  Speaker 4: the phone ons. Okay, so the lattice physically distorts just
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  Speaker 4: a tiny bit to accommodate the electrons, which allows them
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  Speaker 4: to overcome that natural repulsion and actually bunch together.
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  Speaker 3: Wow. Okay Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: Yifonsou, who is one of the lead researchers working on
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  Speaker 4: this puzzle, actually points out that this is a collective phenomenon,
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  Speaker 4: just like super conductivity, but it is a much simpler
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  Speaker 4: form of matter. Simpler how it lacks the zero resistance magic,
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  Speaker 4: which basically makes it a cleaner playground for fundamental understanding.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so the lattice is essentially giving them a track
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  Speaker 2: to bunch up on. But wait, let's make sure we
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  Speaker 2: have the geometry right here. Is this like a crowd
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  Speaker 2: at a sports game doing the stadium wave. Oh, that's
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  Speaker 2: an interesting way to think about it, because individually people
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  Speaker 2: are just standing up and sitting down in their own
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  Speaker 2: localized seats, right, They aren't running around the arena. But
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  Speaker 2: together that coordinated movement creates a structured pattern of high
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  Speaker 2: and low density that visibly moves through the whole space.
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  Speaker 4: It's a really solid starting point. Yeah, but let's push
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  Speaker 4: that analogy just a little further. In a stadium, everyone
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  Speaker 4: is roughly the same size, and the wave is just
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  Speaker 4: vertical movement. Right in our atomic checkerboard, the wave is
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  Speaker 4: the literal physical density of the electrons themselves. So imagine
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  Speaker 4: the stadium wave. But the people out ofly physically compress
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  Speaker 4: into each other at the crest of the wave and
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  Speaker 4: then thin out at the trough.
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  Speaker 2: Oh wow, so they are really packing in tightly exactly.
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  Speaker 4: It is a spatial reorganization. And researchers are studying this
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  Speaker 4: at a very specific material, erbium tritelluride.
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  Speaker 2: Erbium tritelluride, that's a rare Earth material, right, synthesize in
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  Speaker 2: these atonically thin sheets.
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  Speaker 4: Correct, it is what we call a Vanderwheel's material. Scientists
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  Speaker 4: can grow it in the lab into these incredibly thin,
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  Speaker 4: highly two dimensional layers.
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  Speaker 3: So it's basically a flat plane.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. By trapping the electrons on these two dimensional plane
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  Speaker 4: means you restrict their degrees of freedom. They can't move
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  Speaker 4: up or down into the third dimension easily, which forces
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  Speaker 4: them to interact with each other and form these charge
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  Speaker 4: density waves much more readily.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so we have our two dy arena, this incredibly
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  Speaker 2: thin sheet of urbian tritellure ride, and if we track
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  Speaker 2: the temperature drops, we can actually see how this atomic
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  Speaker 2: checkerboard gets built. Because when researchers cool this material to
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  Speaker 2: about negative eight degrees celsius that's roughly eighteen degrees fahrenheit,
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  Speaker 2: they hit the first transition.
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  Speaker 4: That is the critical temperature for the first charge density waves.
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  Speaker 4: The electron spontaneously organized into that periodic bunching pattern, stretching
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  Speaker 4: across the material in one specific direction. This is the
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  Speaker 4: dominant wave. The system has basically chosen a preferred axis
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  Speaker 4: for its spatial reorganization.
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  Speaker 2: But the real anomaly happens when you keep cooling it right,
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  Speaker 2: Because if you drop the temperature all the way down
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  Speaker 2: to negative one hundred and thirteen degrees celsius, so negative
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  Speaker 2: one hundred and seventy one fahrenheit, a second sub dominant
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  Speaker 2: wave emerges. Yes, and it doesn't align with the first
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  Speaker 2: one at all. It organizes perfectly perpendicular.
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  Speaker 4: To it exactly. Yeah, you have the dominant wave running
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  Speaker 4: let's say north to south, and this new subdominant wave
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  Speaker 4: running east to west. They crisscross, creating a literal atomic
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  Speaker 4: checkerboard of two coexisting electronic phases.
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  Speaker 3: That is wild, And.
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  Speaker 4: For years the big question has been how does that
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  Speaker 4: subdominant wave carve out space for itself in a lattice
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  Speaker 4: that is already deeply distorted by the dominant wave.
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  Speaker 2: Which means looking at the static checkerboard at negative one
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  Speaker 2: hundred and seventy one degrees isn't enough. I mean, if
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  Speaker 2: the waves are just sitting there in equilibrium, we don't
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  Speaker 2: know how they actually negotiate that shared.
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  Speaker 3: Space, right.
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  Speaker 4: A static picture doesn't tell you the history.
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  Speaker 2: So how do you force them to interact without just
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  Speaker 2: applying a bunch of heat and melting the whole structure
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  Speaker 2: back to normal?
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  Speaker 4: Well, you have to push the system out of equilibrium,
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  Speaker 4: and a team led by new Geddick at MIT and
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  Speaker 4: Alfred Zong at Stanford devised a brilliant experiment to do
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  Speaker 4: exactly that.
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  Speaker 3: Okay, what did they do?
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  Speaker 4: They cooled the erbium tritelluride samples down even further to
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  Speaker 4: about negative two hundred and thirty degrees celsius or negative
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  Speaker 4: three eighty two fahrenheit.
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  Speaker 3: Oh, that is incredibly cold.
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  Speaker 4: Right at that extreme baseline, there is basically zero thermal noise.
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  Speaker 4: Both waves are absolutely locked into their checkerboard pattern. Then
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  Speaker 4: they use a highly specialized pump probe laser technique.
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  Speaker 2: Ah, this is a shake and listen method exactly.
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  Speaker 4: The shake is the pump. They hit the material with
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  Speaker 4: an ultra short infrared laser pulse, and the goal isn't
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  Speaker 4: to blast the material to pieces. It is a calibrated
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  Speaker 4: physical kick, so.
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  Speaker 5: Just to tap relatively speaking, exactly, the infrared pulse delivers
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  Speaker 5: just enough energy to excite the electrons and temporarily melt
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  Speaker 5: or weaken the charge density waves, disrupting the checkerboard without
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  Speaker 5: permanently destroying the underlying atomic lattice.
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  Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting, because the disruption happens
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  Speaker 2: in femtoseconds. That's millions of a billionth of a second.
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  Speaker 2: So the system is going to try to instantly snap
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  Speaker 2: back to its stable check board state.
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  Speaker 4: Yes, it wants to recover immediately.
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  Speaker 2: So it's like, okay, tell me if this tracks. So
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  Speaker 2: you have this perfect atomic checkerboard, and it's like kicking
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  Speaker 2: down a highly organized sand castle and then taking rapid
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  Speaker 2: fire flash photographs to watch the sand grains magically rebuild
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  Speaker 2: themselves into the castle.
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  Speaker 4: That is actually a great way to picture it. And
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  Speaker 4: taking those flash photographs is the listen part of the experiment,
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  Speaker 4: which is arguably the most technically demanding part of the
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  Speaker 4: whole setup.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you even capture that?
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  Speaker 4: They use a technique called angle resolved photo emission spectroscopy
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  Speaker 4: or rpiece. It is an incredibly elegant application of Einstein's
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  Speaker 4: photoelectric effect. Once you've delivered the infrared shake pulse, you
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  Speaker 4: wait a highly specific fraction of a peak a second,
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  Speaker 4: and you hit the material with a second laser pulse
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  Speaker 4: the probe.
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  Speaker 3: But this one is an infrared right right.
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  Speaker 4: This one is an ultraviolet burst of high energy.
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  Speaker 2: Photons, and because of the photoelectric effect, those high energy
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  Speaker 2: photons literally kick electrons completely out of the mi material exactly,
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  Speaker 2: So we aren't just taking a picture of the surface.
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  Speaker 2: We are ejecting the subjects from the arena and catching
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  Speaker 2: them in a detector.
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  Speaker 4: And this is where the real detective work happens. When
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  Speaker 4: you catch those ejected electrons, you measure two things, their
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  Speaker 4: kinetic energy and their emission angle. Okay, from those two variables,
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  Speaker 4: you can mathematically reconstruct the exact energy and momentum those
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  Speaker 4: electrons had while they were still inside the material, like
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  Speaker 4: right before the photon hit them.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, because in quantum mechanics, momentum and wavelength are deeply linked. Yes,
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  Speaker 2: So if you know the momentum of the electron when
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  Speaker 2: it gets kicked out, you know its exact state inside
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  Speaker 2: the material. You map the momentum space and you can
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  Speaker 2: literally draw the geometry of the charge density wave. At
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  Speaker 2: that precise femtosecond.
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  Speaker 4: You are capturing a perfect stop motion snapshot of the
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  Speaker 4: electronic structure. Now, the genius of the pump probe setup
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  Speaker 4: is how they actually control time to get the next
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  Speaker 4: frame of the movie.
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  Speaker 3: How do they do that?
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  Speaker 4: You repeat the entire experiment, but you delay the second
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  Speaker 4: ultraviolet pulse by just a few more femtoseconds. But wait,
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  Speaker 4: how do you delay light?
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  Speaker 2: You can't just use like an electronic timer. Electronics are
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  Speaker 2: way too slow for that.
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  Speaker 4: Exactly, you literally change the distance the light has to travel.
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  Speaker 4: You bounce the second laser pulse off a mirror, and
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  Speaker 4: you physically move that mirror a few micrometers further away.
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  Speaker 3: That is so low tech, but so brilliant.
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  Speaker 4: Isn't it. Because the speed of light is constant, that
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  Speaker 4: tiny extra physical distance translates into a precise femtosecond delay.
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  Speaker 3: It is stunning precision.
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  Speaker 2: By moving that mirror micrometers at a time, taking snapshots
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  Speaker 2: over and over, they stitch together a literal femtosecond flip
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  Speaker 2: book of the electrons pulling themselves back together into those
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  Speaker 2: two perpendicular waves.
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  Speaker 4: And that flip book is what finally gave us the answers.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so we have the flip book of the universe
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  Speaker 2: on a microscopic scale. What did this atomic shake and
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  Speaker 2: listen routine actually reveal about how these two phases rebuild
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  Speaker 2: themselves from the chaos.
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  Speaker 4: It revealed a tail of two entirely different recoveries. It
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  Speaker 4: fundamentally proved that these two waves operate under completely different
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  Speaker 4: thermodynamic rules. Okay, let's look at the dominant wave first,
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  Speaker 4: the one that originally formed at negative eight degrees celsius.
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  Speaker 4: When they watched the snapshots of this recovery after the
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  Speaker 4: infrared kick, it re emerged continuously and uniformly across the
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  Speaker 4: entire material.
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  Speaker 2: So the order parameter, like the measure of the waves strength,
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  Speaker 2: just smoothly dialed back up across the whole two D
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  Speaker 2: plane simultaneously, regardless of how hard it was kicked.
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  Speaker 4: Yes, in physics, this is a textbook continuous or a
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  Speaker 4: second order phase transition. Think about a standard ferromagnet. If
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: you heat a magnet up past its curey temperature, it
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  Speaker 4: loses its magnetic field entirely, but as it cools back down,
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  Speaker 4: the magnetism smoothly and uniformly restores itself across the entire
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  Speaker 4: volume of the material. The dominant waves recovery was exactly.
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  Speaker 2: Like that, So it's not like the magnetic field shatters
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  Speaker 2: into pieces and reforms. The global field just attenuates and
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  Speaker 2: then restores exactly So the first wave comes back like
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  Speaker 2: a room slowly dimming into darkness.
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  Speaker 3: Uniform and gradual.
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  Speaker 4: That's a perfect way to describe it. But the subdominant wave,
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  Speaker 4: the one that chriss crosses it, behaves completely differently. That
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  Speaker 4: was the mass of unexpected discovery here. What did it
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  Speaker 4: do when they looked at the fentosecond snapshots? The subdominant
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  Speaker 4: wave did not smoothly dial back up. Instead, it suffered
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  Speaker 4: from what we call nucleation.
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  Speaker 2: So it formed in isolated pockets.
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  Speaker 4: Yes, it formed in highly localized islands. Tiny patches of
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  Speaker 4: the subdominant wave would spontaneously form while the rest of
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  Speaker 4: the material remained totally chaotic. Over time, those isolated pockets
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  Speaker 4: would expand outward, eventually connecting with one another to rebuild
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  Speaker 4: that continuous east west grid.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so going back to the room analogy. Instead of
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  Speaker 2: the room smoothly dimming, the second wave comes back like
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  Speaker 2: turning on scattered lamps one by one until the whole
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  Speaker 2: room is lit.
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  Speaker 4: And actually that brings us right back to your glass
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  Speaker 4: of ice water from the very beginning. Wait really, yeah,
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  Speaker 4: it perfectly mirrors the ice water. This patchy nucleation driven
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  Speaker 4: rocot is a classic first order phase transition.
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  Speaker 2: Oh because when liquid water freezes into solid ice It
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: requires an activation energy to start.
• 14:08
  Speaker 4: Exactly, It doesn't instantly turn into a solid block of
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  Speaker 4: ice all at once. It requires a seed crystal. It
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: forms tiny localized crystals, little pockets of ice that expand
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  Speaker 4: outward until they consume the surrounding liquid.
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  Speaker 3: Wow.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, So why does it matter so much that one
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  Speaker 2: wave is second order and the other is first order?
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  Speaker 4: Because it finally solves the real estate debate we talked
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  Speaker 4: about earlier. It proves that the subdominant wave isn't just
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  Speaker 4: a weaker clone of the dominant wave. It relies on
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: fundamentally different energetic rules to establish itself. How so, well,
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  Speaker 4: the dominant wave can just smoothly map onto the underlying
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  Speaker 4: atomic lattice, but the subdominant wave is trying to form
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  Speaker 4: in a lattice that is already heavily distorted by the
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: dominant wave.
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  Speaker 2: Ah.
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  Speaker 3: So it's an uphill battle.
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  Speaker 4: Exactly to carve out its space, it has to overcome
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  Speaker 4: a significant energy barrier, which forces it to nucleate in pockets,
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: exactly like ice freezing in water. It shows us that
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: in the quantum realm, coexisting phases don't just ignore each other,
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  Speaker 4: they fundamentally alter the energetic landscape for one another man.
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  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, we have
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: to remember what we are ultimately trying to achieve with
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: all this. We are trying to master materials that are
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: orders of magnitude more complex than herbium tritelluride.
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: Right. If we connect this to the bigger picture, we
• 15:28
  Speaker 4: are really trying to master high temperature superconductors, right, materials
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: that can carry immense amounts of electrical current with absolutely
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: zero resistance, you know, without needing to be cooled by
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: expensive liquid helium. Imagine a power grid that loses zero
• 15:43
  Speaker 4: energy over thousands of miles, or highly advanced quantum computing
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: systems that don't suffer from thermal decoherence.
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  Speaker 2: But those high temperature cuprids are a mess of competing phases, right, Like,
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: they have charge density ways that actively compete with the superconductivity.
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  Speaker 4: Exactly in many cupriates, if the charge dense city wave
• 16:00
  Speaker 4: gets stronger, the superconductivity dies. They're literally fighting for the
• 16:04
  Speaker 4: same electron states. So if we want to harness zero
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: resistance power, we have to know how to suppress the
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: phases we don't want and enhance the phases we do.
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  Speaker 4: But until now, we haven't fully understood the ground rules
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: of how these phases negotiate space when they are disturbed.
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  Speaker 2: Right, because we were just looking at static pictures before.
• 16:22
  Speaker 4: Exactly, but by perfectly timing these pump pro laser pulses
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: to disrupt and observe getting in, Zong's team prove that
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: we can differentiate the exact thermodynamic mechanisms of overlapping states.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? It basically means we
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: have a new powerful way to uncover the hidden physics
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: of quantum materials. We're no longer just theorizing based on
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: frozen snapshots. We are actively picking the tires.
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah, we're watching the femtosecond movie of electrons reorganizing themselves, right.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: Proving that corexisting states rely on totally different recovery mechanics,
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: which brings us one massive step closer to revolutionary electronics
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: that make today's silicon chips look like the Stone Age.
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: It really shifts condensed matter physics from a discipline of
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: just passive observation to a discipline of active manipulation.
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  Speaker 2: Which leaves us with a pretty staggering implication.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Think about this.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: You know, if scientists can now deliberately use targeted infrared
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: pulses to shake and listen to atomic structures, revealing how
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: these hidden, coexisting phases rebuild themselves. Could this principle of
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: deliberate ultrafast disruption be the key to unlocking entirely new
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: states of matter? Oh?
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: Absolutely?
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: What if in the near future we aren't just observing
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: these complex quantum materials, but we're actively programming them like software,
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: using precise laser sequences to force electrons into custom atomic
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: realities that don't even exist in nature. Something to think
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: about the next time you look at a glass of
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: ice water