A critical aspect of sustainability is to replace conventional gas-based refrigerators with magnetic refrigeration technology. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Tafti Lab is synthesizing new materials for this effect. Our graduate student, Kyle Fruhling, has recently published a careful on tuning the magnetocaloric effect in rare-earth-based materials with a kagome lattice. His results… Read more
Enrique Gonzalez, a graduate student in the Tafti Lab at the BC physics department, is a recipient of the 2023 NSF-GRFP award. This prestigious scholarship is awarded based on the intellectual merits and broader impacts of the student’s research proposal. Enrique Gonzalez proposed a study of topological magnetic materials for spintronic applications. His research will… Read more
Weyl fermions are relativistic particles that could emerge in condensed matter materials. They have been intensely studied for their electronic properties but it was not clear whether they can participate in magnetic interactions too. Tafti Lab graduate student, Xiaohan Yao, has found evidence of Weyl-mediated magnetism in the non-centrosymmetric crystals of SmAlSi. She made a… Read more
Magnetic materials with a honeycomb lattice structure have been intensely studied in search of a quantum spin liquid phase, where the electron spins are entangled instead of ordered. In such materials, the coupling between spin and orbital moments is believed to create an effective spin-1/2 state known as the J=1/2 state. The Tafti Lab graduate… Read more
Our daily lives depend on the flow of water in pipes and electrons in wires. As similar as they may sound, the two phenomena are fundamentally different. Water molecules flow as a fluid continuum, not as individual molecules, obeying the laws of hydrodynamics. Electrons, however, flow as individual particles and diffuse inside metals as they… Read more
The electronic properties of Weyl nodes have been the subject of intense research, but little is known about their magnetic properties. In this new work, Hung-Yu Yang from Tafti Lab and collaborators from NIST and Johns Hopkins University used neutron scattering and transport measurements to show how nesting between the Weyl nodes can drive magnetic… Read more
Novel electromagnetic responses are expected in magnetic Weyl semimetals. However, the Weyl nodes in real materials are away from the Fermi level. This work reveals the presence of Weyl nodes at the Fermi level in CeAlSi from a combined analysis of density functional theory and quantum oscillations. Thus, a hitherto unobserved loop shape Hall effect… Read more
Colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) is a large decrease of electrical resistivity when a magnetic material is subjected to an external magnetic field. This effect has applications in the magnetic switch, spin valve, magnetic memory, and spintronic technologies. CMR has been a subject of intense research, and its mechanism has been identified to be a combination of… Read more