Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids

Claire Donnelly and Eugene Kim will receive the 2024 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation

On September 4, 2023, Minister-President Michael Kretschmer and Max Planck President Patrick Cramer hosted a ceremonial event at the Kulturpalast in Dresden commemorating the 30-year success story of the Max Planck Society in Leipzig and Dresden. 

The new team of Vice-Presidents includes three women. This means women now hold the majority on the Executive Committee

Experiments show that the heavy fermion compound YbRh₂Si₂ undergoes a spectacular electro-nuclear phase transition into a modulated magnetic state at a temperature as low as 1.5 mK. In a just published paper, an international team of scientists from the UK (Royal Holloway University of London) and Germany (Goethe University Frankfurt, MPI-CPfS Dresden) demonstrated that in YbRh₂Si₂, at T_A = 1.5 mK, the tiny nuclear moments profoundly change an electronic magnetic state formed at a much higher temperature  T_N = 70.5 mK.  

Roughly 90 percent of all materials can have electronic states on surfaces which differ from those in their bulk

It is frequently only the development of new materials that makes technological advances possible, whether in the areas of energy supply or information technology. With the Heusler compounds, Claudia Felser, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, uncovered a rich source of materials that offer promising properties for a variety of applications.

Electric cables that routinely conduct electricity without loss – physicists have been motivated by this idea ever since superconductivity was discovered 100 years ago.

Even the most efficient motor generates more heat than propulsion. However, thermoelectric generators could convert some of this unused energy into electricity. Scientists are currently searching for suitable materials.

By combining novel materials into electromagnetic quantum circuits, the circuit can be used as a sensitive probe of the material structure, and strong quantum effects in the material can be used to make a new class of devices for quantum technology.

Combining nanoscale 3D printing, and magnetic microscopy, researchers have created DNA-like magnetic nanostructures. Nanoscale textures form both in the material and the magnetic field, opening opportunities for computing applications – and beyond. 

Using a recently developed formalism, titled topological quantum chemistry (TQC) and magnetic TQC, we carry out a high-throughput search of topological materials in well known databases, such as Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. We identified as many as 20000 materials that display topological features and another ~100 new topological magnetic materials. Herein, we review this discovery and provide insights for future material search directions.

The Quantum Hall Effect (QHE) in two-dimensional (2D) metals is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon and has helped to solve many important aspects of quantum physics. In common three-dimensional (3D) metals, the QHE is usually forbidden, because the third dimension destroys the quantization. However, our studies on the 3D metals ZrTe ₅ and HfTe ₅ show that their Hall resistance can be quasi-quantized if there are enough electrons in the materials. This makes the Hall effect in ZrTe ₅ and HfTe ₅ a real 3D counterpart to QHE in 2D systems.

The search for new quantum materials with novel properties is often focused on materials containing transition-metal or rare-earth elements. The presence of the atomic-like d or f orbitals provides a fruitful playground to generate novel phenomena. In order to efficiently design and tune the materials, it is essential to identify the d or f orbitals that actively participate in the formation of the ground state. Here we developed a new experimental method that circumvents the need for theory and instead provides the information as measured.