New transitory form of silica observed

A Carnegie-led team was able to discover five new forms of silica under extreme pressures at room temperature. Their findings are published by . A simulated visual representation of the structural transition from coesite to post-stishovite. The silicon atoms (blue spheres) surrounded by four oxygen atoms (red spheres) are shown as blue tetrahedrons....

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You can't play checkers with charge ordering

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) fellows were among physicists who observed the shape of a strange phenomenon that interferes with high-temperature superconductivity called charge ordering, discovering that it is stripy, not checkered, and settling a long-standing debate in the field. Charge ordering creates instability in some metals...

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The universal nature of three-body attraction

An exotic physical effect based on the attraction among three particles has a similar universality to that of common two-body interactions, Yusuke Horinouchi from the University of Tokyo and Masahito Ueda from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have found ("Onset of a Limit Cycle and Universal Three-Body Parameter in Efimov Physics"). Figure...

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