Paradoxical Crystal Baffles Physicists

In a deceptively drab black crystal, physicists have stumbled upon a baffling behavior, one that appears
to blur the line between the properties of metals, in which electrons flow freely, and those of insulators,
in which electrons are effectively stuck in place. The crystal exhibits hallmarks of both simultaneously.
Quanta Magazine

This is a big shock, said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter

physicist at the University of Cambridge whose findings appeared this
month in an advance online edition of the journal Science. Insulators
and metals are essentially opposites, she said. But somehow, its a
material thats both. Its contrary to everything that we know.
The material, a much-studied compound called samarium hexaboride
or SmB6, is an insulator at very low temperatures, meaning it resists
the flow of electricity. Its resistance implies that electrons (the

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Original story reprinted with permission
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to enhance public understanding of
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developments and trends in
mathematics and the physical and life
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building blocks of electric currents) cannot move through the crystal

more than an atoms width in any direction. And yet, Sebastian and
her collaborators observed electrons traversing orbits millions of
atoms in diameter inside the crystal in response to a magnetic field
a mobility that is only expected in materials that conduct electricity.
Calling to mind the famous wave-particle duality of quantum
mechanics, the new evidence suggests SmB6 might be neither a

textbook metal nor an insulator, Sebastian said, but something more complicated that we dont know
how to imagine.
It is just a magnificent paradox, said Jan Zaanen, a condensed matter theorist at Leiden University in
the Netherlands. On the basis of established wisdoms this cannot possibly happen, and henceforth
completely new physics should be at work.
It is too soon to tell what, if anything, this new physics will be good for, but physicists like Victor
Galitski, of the University of Maryland, College Park, say it is well worth the effort to find out.
Oftentimes, he said, big discoveries are really puzzling things, like superconductivity. That
phenomenon, discovered in 1911, took nearly half a century to understand, and it now generates the
worlds most powerful magnets, such as those that accelerate particles through the 17-mile tunnel of
the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Theorists have already begun to venture guesses as to what might be going on inside SmB6. One
promising approach models the material as a higher-dimensional black hole. But no theory yet
captures the whole story. I do not think that there is any remotely credible hypothesis proposed at this
moment in time, Zaanen said.
SmB6 has resisted classification since Soviet scientists first studied its properties in the early 1960s,
followed by better-known experiments at Bell Labs.
Counting up the electrons in the orbital shells that surround its samarium and boron nuclei indicates
that roughly half an electron should be left over, on average, per samarium nucleus (a fraction, because
the nuclei have mixed valence, or alternating numbers of orbiting electrons). These conduction
electrons should flow through the material like water flowing through a pipe, and thus, SmB6 should
be a metal. Thats the idea people had back when I started working on this problem as a young guy,
around 1975, said Jim Allen, an experimental physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
who has studied SmB6 on and off since then.
But while samarium hexaboride does conduct electricity at room temperature, things get strange as it
cools. The crystal is what physicists call a strongly correlated material; its electrons acutely feel one
anothers effects, causing them to lock together into an emergent, collective behavior. Whereas strong

correlations in certain superconductors cause the electrical resistance to drop to zero at low
temperatures, in the case of SmB6, the electrons seem to gum up when cooled, and the material
behaves as an insulator.
The effect stems from the 5.5 electrons, on average, that occupy an uncomfortably tight shell encasing
each samarium nucleus. These close-knit electrons mutually repel one another, and that essentially
tells the electrons, Dont move around, Allen explained. The last half electron trapped in each of
these shells has a complex relationship with its other, freer, conducting half. Below minus 223 degrees
Celsius, the conduction electrons in SmB6 are thought to hybridize with these trapped electrons,
forming a new, hybrid orbit around the samarium nuclei. Experts initially believed the crystal turns
into an insulator because none of the electrons in this hybrid orbit can move.
The resistivity shows its an insulator; photoemission shows its a good insulator; optical absorption
shows its a good insulator; neutron scattering shows its an insulator, said Lu Li, a condensed matter
physicist at the University of Michigan whose experimental group also studies SmB6.
But this is no garden-variety insulator. Not only does its insulating behavior arise from strong
correlations between its electrons, but in the past five years, mounting evidence has suggested that it is
a topological insulator at low temperatures, a material that resists the flow of electricity through its
three-dimensional bulk, while conducting electricity along its two-dimensional surfaces. Topological
insulators have become one of the hottest topics in condensed matter physics since their 2007
discovery because of their potential use in quantum computers and other novel devices. And yet, SmB6
does not neatly fit that category either.
Early last year, hoping to add to the evidence that SmB6 is a topological insulator, Sebastian and her
student Beng Tan visited the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, or MagLab, at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico and attempted to measure wavelike undulations called quantum
oscillations in the electrical resistance of their crystal samples. The rate of quantum oscillations and
how they vary as the sample is rotated can be used to map out the Fermi surface of the crystal, a
signature property which is sort of the geometry of how the electrons flow through the material,
Sebastian explained.
Sebastian and Tan didnt see any quantum oscillations in New Mexico, however. Scrambling to salvage
Tans doctoral project, they measured a less interesting property instead, and, to check these results,
booked time at another MagLab location, in Tallahassee, Fla.
In Florida, Sebastian and Tan noticed that their measurement probe had an extra slot with a divingboard-style cantilever on it, which could be used to measure quantum oscillations in the magnetization
of their crystals. After failing to see quantum oscillations in the electrical resistance, they hadnt
planned on looking for them in a different material propertybut why not? I was thinking, fine, lets

stick a sample on, Sebastian said. They cooled down their samples, turned on the magnetic field, and
started measuring. Suddenly they realized the signal coming from the diving board was oscillating.
We were like, waitwhat? she said.
In that experiment and subsequent ones at MagLab, they measured quantum oscillations deep in the
interior of their crystal samples. The data translated into a huge, three-dimensional Fermi surface,
representing electrons circulating throughout the material in the presence of the magnetic field, as
conduction electrons do in a metal. Judging by its Fermi surface, electrons in the interior of SmB6
travel 1 million times farther than its electrical resistance would suggest is possible.
The Fermi surface is like that in copper; its like that in silver; its like that in gold, said Li, whose
group reported surface-level quantum oscillations in Science in December. Not just metals these are
very good metals.
Somehow, at low temperatures and in the presence of a magnetic field, the strongly correlated
electrons in SmB6 can move like those in the most conductive metals, even though they cannot conduct
electricity. How can the crystal behave like both a metal and an insulator?
Contamination of the samples might seem likely, if not for another surprising discovery: Not only did
Sebastian, Tan and their collaborators find quantum oscillations in an insulator, but the form of the
oscillationsnamely, how quickly they grew in amplitude as the temperature decreasedgreatly
diverged from the predictions of a universal formula for conventional metals. Every metal ever tested
has conformed to this Lifshitz-Kosevich formula (named for Arnold Kosevich and Evgeny Lifshitz),
suggesting that the quantum oscillations in SmB6 come from an entirely new physical phenomenon. If
it were coming from something trivial, like inclusions of some other materials, it would have followed
the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula, Galitski said. So I think its a real effect.
Amazingly, the observed deviation from the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula was presaged in 2010 by Sean
Hartnoll and Diego Hofman, both then at Harvard University, in a paper that recast strongly correlated
materials as higher-dimensional black holes, those infinitely steep curves in space-time predicted by
Albert Einstein. In their paper, Hartnoll and Hofman investigated the effect of strong correlations in
metals by calculating corresponding properties of their simpler black hole modelspecifically, how
long an electron could orbit the black hole before falling in. I had calculated what would replace this
Lifshitz-Kosevich formula in more exotic metals, said Hartnoll, who is now at Stanford University.
And indeed it seems that the form [Sebastian] has found can be matched with this formula that I
derived.
This generalized Lifshitz-Kosevich formula holds for a class of metallike states of matter that includes
conventional metals, Hartnoll says. But even if SmB6 is another member of this generalized metal

class, this still does not explain why it acts as an insulator. Other theorists are attempting to model the
material with more traditional mathematical machinery. Some say its electrons may be rapidly
vacillating between insulating and conducting states in some novel quantum fashion.
Theorists are busy theorizing, and Li and his collaborators are preparing to try and replicate
Sebastians results with their own samples of SmB6. The chance discovery in Florida was only the first
step. Now to resolve the paradox.
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent
publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by
covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
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