#nematic

NEMATIC:DEMO RELEASE

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It is a cycle. It is a pattern repeating over and over. It is a closed circuit through which a current flows without end. Penetrating the display, every nematic liquid crystal envelops every part of your body, every cell and atom. Perhaps within this, you will find your freedom.

NEMATIC is a project I'm working on together with my partner mörfly. This setting itself has existed for almost two years now, and it was only this summer that I decided to start working on creating the game. This project means a lot to me, as so many things in it are a reflection of my own consciousness. A demo version is ready. Even after its release, we continue to work, but the release date for the full game is still unknown. If you support us and this project, we would appreciate it. For us, every like, comment, and download is incredibly important.

Here's some screenshots from the demo:

Liquid crystal is a state of matter that exhibits properties of both liquid and solid. It can flow like a liquid, while its constituent molecules are aligned as in a solid. The liquid crystal is widely used nowadays, for example, as a core element of LCD devices. The magnetic analog of this kind of material is dubbed the "spin-nematic phase," where spin moments play the role of the molecules. However, it has not yet been directly observed despite its prediction a half-century ago. The main challenge stems from the fact that most conventional experimental techniques are insensitive to spin quadrupoles, which are the defining features of this spin-nematic phase. But now for the first time in the world, a team of researchers led by Professor KIM Bumjoon at the IBS Center for Artificial Low Dimensional Electronic Systems in South Korea succeeded at directly observing spin quadrupoles. This work was made possible through remarkable achievements over the last decades in synchrotron facility development.

Developing Line-up

Details of the mechanisms underlying tissue shaping from the study of fruit fly embryo development – confinement by surrounding tissue leads to spindle-shaped cells aligning with their long axes parallel (termed nematic)

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Tirthankar Ray, Damo Shi and Tony J. C. Harris

Department of Cell & Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Development, June 2024

Thin film reveals origins of pre-superconducting phase

RIKEN physicists have found an ideal platform for exploring the behavior of electrons in a material as it approaches superconductivity. This could help to develop new superconductors that operate at more convenient temperatures than existing ones. The study is published in the journal Physical Review B. Superconductors carry electrical current without any resistance, and are used in powerful electromagnets and magnetic sensors, for example. But superconductivity generally only occurs at low temperatures, so researchers are seeking high-temperature superconductors that could open up a much wider range of applications. The ultimate goal is to find materials that superconduct at room temperature. Superconductivity in so-called conventional superconductors occurs when electrons pair up. This pairing prevents the electrons from scattering as they flow through a material.

Researchers from PSI's Spectroscopy of Quantum Materials group together with scientists from Beijing Normal University have solved a puzzle at the forefront of research into iron-based superconductors: the origin of FeSe's electronic nematicity. Using Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) at the Swiss Light Source (SLS), they discovered that, surprisingly, this electronic phenomenon is primarily spin driven. Electronic nematicity is believed to be an important ingredient in high-temperature superconductivity, but whether it helps or hinders it is still unknown. Their findings are published in Nature Physics.

Near PSI, where the Swiss forest is ever present in people's lives, you often see log piles: incredibly neat log piles. Wedge shaped logs for firewood are stacked carefully lengthways but with little thought to their rotation. When particles in a material spontaneously line up, like the logs in these log piles, such that they break rotational symmetry but preserve translational symmetry, a material is said to be in a nematic state. In a liquid crystal, this means that the rod shaped molecules are able to flow like a liquid in the direction of their alignment, but not in other directions. Electronic nematicity occurs when the electron orbitals in a material align in this way. Typically, this electronic nematicity manifests itself as anisotropic electronic properties: for example, resistivity or conductivity exhibiting vastly different magnitudes when measured along different axes.

Strange Electron Behavior Surprises Solid State Physicists

New Wave of Electron Research

A surprise result for solid state physicists hints at an unusual electron behavior.

While studying the behavior of electrons in iron-based superconducting materials, researchers at the University of Tokyo observed a strange signal relating to the way electrons are arranged. The signal implies a new arrangement of electrons the researchers call a nematicity wave, and they hope to collaborate with theoretical physicists to better understand it. The nematicity wave could help researchers understand the way electrons interact with each other in superconductors.

A long-standing dream of solid state physicists is to fully understand the phenomenon of superconductivity — essentially electronic conduction without the resistance that creates heat and drains power. It would usher in a whole new world of incredibly efficient or powerful devices and is already being used on Japan’s experimental magnetic levitation bullet train. But there is much to explore in this complex topic, and it often surprises researchers with unexpected results and observations.

Nematicity is a new piece in double bilayer graphene phase diagram puzzle

Although twisted sheets of double bilayer graphene have been studied extensively the past few years, there are still pieces missing in the puzzle that is its phase diagram—the different undisturbed, ground states of the system. Writing in Nature Physics, Carmen Rubio-Verdú and colleagues have found a new puzzle piece: an electronic nematic phase.

First described in another state of matter called a liquid crystal, a nematic phase occurs when particles in a material break an otherwise symmetrical structure and come to loosely orient with one another along the same axis. This phenomenon is the basis of the LCD display commonly used in televisions and computer monitors. In an electronic nematic phase, the particles in question are electrons, whose behavior and arrangement in a material can influence how well that material will conduct an electrical current in different directions.

"The data are amazing," says co-author Rafael Fernandes, a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesotawho met senior author Abhay Pasupathy as a postdoc at Columbia. "You can clearly see that there's a symmetry being broken."

Active liquid crystal systems examined in search of autonomous materials systems

Liquid Crystals (LC) are widely deployed in display technology and optical fibers. From smartphones in your pockets to large screen TVs, LCs are everywhere, as this special state of matter has been found in colorful soap bubbles as well as certain living tissues. 

But LCs are by no means limited to use in gadgets or electronic devices. For quite some time, scientists have been studying the possibility of creating "active nematics," a particular class of active LCs, which consist of self-driven units capable of converting chemical or other forms of energy into motion. When administered the proper stimuli, scientists have found that they can generate a predictable response from different LCs, which allows for design of smart, multifunctional materials systems, such as a bacteria-killing multiphase systems capable of self-regulating and reporting the presence and elimination of pathogens. Previous studies have demonstrated that light patterns can be harnessed to direct the creation and motion of topological defects in LCs, which could serve as cargo carriers or signal transmitters that further enhance the response of the material.

Their findings were published in the journal Nature Materials on February 18,2021. The work was a successful collaboration between several research groups, including Professors Juan de Pablo, Margaret Gardel, Vincenzo Vitelli and Aaron Dinner from the University of Chicago and Professor Zev Bryant from Stanford University.