The strange world that physicists have discovered is everywhere

the Nano technique

Writing a Technology Innovation Website – 09/15/2021

The experiment involved a triangular web of balls attached to flexible beams, all immersed in a viscous liquid. It is the same strange emerging geometries that explain the unusual interactions of these materials with light and electricity.

[Imagem: Tsvi Tlusty et al. – 10.1103/PhysRevE.104.025002]

Topological insulators

The newly discovered class of materials almost immediately became one of the stars of all research dreaming of new computational structures, Electronic Processors Outside Moore’s Law Even quantum processors and photoprocessors that work with light.

They are topological insulators, materials that have peculiar properties only on their surface, but not on the inside. For example, the symmetry of matter prevents electrons from diffusion, a concept that resulted in 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

If any behavior guided by quantum mechanics can be called quite correctly, then these materials are alien within the strange.

Such anomalies have so far made physicists think that topological insulators represent very special states of matter, and their properties emerge only under more special conditions.

Nothing could be further from the truth: researcher Tsvi Tlusty of the National University of Science and Technology Ulsan, in South Korea, has shown the strange topological features presented in complex quantum matter systems (matter interacts according to the laws of quantum mechanics) also appearing in common matter at room temperature ( Matter reacts according to the laws of classical mechanics).

In other words, these “strange phenomena” are not so strange, they are much more widespread than previously thought.

non-hierarchical systems

The strange behaviors exhibited by topological insulators bypass one of the foundations of basic physics, the so-called “law of conservation of energy”.

What they don’t comply with the law: The point is that energy conservation works in closed systems, and most of the systems we know and deal with are open and dispersed, exchanging energy and information with the outside world. And some of these open systems, which mathematicians call non-hierarchical, react very differently than the norm, which is why we say they are strange.

So Tsvi Tlusty was ready to check if these strange structures are really unusual in nature. After all, we are immersed in a dispersed world, and organisms are inherently open to exchange with the environment at all levels.

The answer to Tlusty is that there is no exoticism at stake – these phenomena happen everywhere.

The soft matter network flow (model) generates peculiar topological properties in the energy bands (right), where Fermi arcs can be seen, and in the density of states (left).
[Imagem: UNIST]

Weirdness is everywhere

By correlating topology with hydrodynamics, Tlusty showed for the first time peculiar topological signatures in the common matter. In fact, he recorded this phenomenon not only in hard solid surfaces, as in the materials studied so far, but also in soft materials, including a simple elastic network subject to a viscous flow.

Surprisingly, he even noticed the Fermi arc, a particularly elusive form hitherto only seen in the photonic crystal. Physical formations similar to elastic matter in viscous flow are common in soft matter and living materials, for example in colloidal crystals and biological tissues. It is even possible to build these soft nanonetworks from DNA molecules and proteins.

“All of this suggests that alien topology is ubiquitous in our immediate environment, perhaps even in our bodies,” Tlusty said. “As in the fields of electronic or optical topological materials, we can even begin to think about possible applications of technology based on topology in this common system.”

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