Takashi Imai stands next to Mingxuan Fu in the lab.

December 16, 2015

Physicists solve 40-year mystery, proving that the elusive “spin liquid” does exist


The physics professor and a talented graduate student, Mingxuan Fu, have established that an elusive form of matter, known as “spin liquid”, previously known only in theory, does in fact exist.


The term “spin liquid” relates to the electrons belonging to the atoms of a manufactured crystal. When super-cooled to -272 C and subjected to a magnetic pull 60,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, the electrons refuse to line up in predictable patterns.


They trade partners constantly, resulting in an unresolved “liquid” state, an elusive state of matter that for more than 40 years has only been imagined on paper and which has been the subject of hundreds of scientific papers.

The research, recently published in the journal Science, answers a complex question of condensed-matter physics and represents a career high for Imai, who has been working on the problem for nine years, sometimes sleeping on a couch in his lab to babysit his experiments, using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to search for the elusive prize, and finally finding it in a particular orientation of specialized crystals manufactured by colleagues at Stanford, MIT and the University of Chicago.


“With every data point we measured, we did a high five,” Imai says.


Imai says McMaster’s strength in condensed-matter physics is the legacy of Bertram Brockhouse, who is considered a founding father of solid-state physics, now called condensed-matter physics, who earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1994.
