Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory discovered a new phase a matter called “half-ice, half-fire.”
This elemental moniker is a reference to the ordered (cold) and disordered (hot) state of an electron under an external magnetic field
This discovery could improve quantum information storage by using phase changes as bits.
American poet Robert Frost loved to wax poetic (literally) about fire and ice. What he’d make of a new “half-ice, half-fire” phase of matter discovered by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, however, is anyone’s guess.
Before delving deep into a rabbit hole that traverses particle and material physics, one thing needs clarifying—this is not a material that’s physically both fire and ice. Instead, “half-ice, half-fire” describes the highly-ordered (or cold) electron spins that are in combination with highly-disordered (or hot) spins. This phase of matter has never been observed before, and can switch phases in a reasonable, finite temperature, according to the researchers. This makes it a particularly attractive candidate for quantum information storage technologies. A study detailing this discovery was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“Finding new states with exotic physical properties—and being able to understand and control the transitions between those states—are central problems in the fields of condensed matter physics and materials science,” Weiguo Yin, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “Solving those problems could lead to great advances in technologies like quantum computing and spintronics.”
This discovery is a kind of sequel to Win and colleague Alexei Tsvelik’s work with a pseudo-inverse “half-fire, half-ice” phase, initially discovered back in 2015 (and further elaborated upon in a study published in February of 2024) by studying the magnetic compound Sr3CuIrO6, which contains strontium, copper, iridium, and oxygen. In the “half-fire, half-ice” phase, the spins on the copper sites of the atomic lattice are hot, while the cold spins are on the iridium sites.
“But despite our extensive research, we still didn’t know how this state could be utilized,” Tsvelik said in a press statement. “We were missing pieces of the puzzle.”
This new work shows that the team’s initial discovery has an reversed twin of sorts, in which hot and cold spins switch positions. And the authors state that this switching occurs along an ultranarrow temperature range. This discovery could have a wide array of applications in everything from refrigeration technology to quantum information storage—in the latter, these phases could act as bits for storing information.
“Next, we are going to explore the fire-ice phenomenon in systems with quantum spins and with additional lattice, charge, and orbital degrees of freedom,” Yin said in a new press statement. “The door to new possibilities is now wide open.”
Headshot of Darren Orf
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.