For the first time, scientists have observed a collection of particles, also known as a quasiparticle, that’s massless when moving one direction but has mass in the other direction. The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers.
The team, led by scientists at Penn State and Columbia University, recently published their discovery in the journal Physical Review X.
“This was totally unexpected,” said Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author on the paper. “We weren’t even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn’t understand—and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none.”
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