The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has received a prestigious Materials Research Science and Engineering Center from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to spark discoveries that will lead to new industries in clean energy, computing and national security.

It is seen that the onset of ferromagnetic order in the Kagome-lattice magnetic Weyl semi-metal Co3Sn2S2 is accompanied by a broken local symmetry describable as a rhombohedral to monoclinic distortion.

Quantum materials behave in surprising ways because of quantum physics. For example, they can be superconductors, which can allow electricity to flow with no resistance. These materials could lead to completely new technologies. In an advance for quantum materials, scientists tested the ability of techniques called entanglement witnesses to accurately identify pairs of entangled magnetic particles.

Surprisingly, it is shown that the ferromagnetic (FM) ground state in the magnetic Weyl semimetal Co3Sn2S3 with magnetic Co ions on a Kagome lattice is stabilized by the third-neighbor “across-hexagon” interaction.

Reading this sentence on a screen may not take very long, but the technology that made it possible took decades of scientific discovery and creative thinking. From the first transistor to supercomputers that can perform 200,000 trillion calculations per second, science and engineering have made giant strides in developing tools that make our lives safer, healthier, and easier. Advances in materials enabled this progress. For example, modern computing would not be possible without semiconductors. Similarly, future revolutions in science, engineering, and technology will be driven by advances in quantum materials. Associate Professor Steve Johnston sees the origins of such enormous gains at the microscopic level. Capitalizing on UT’s multidisciplinary expertise, his plan uses artificial intelligence to predict how quantum materials behave and won $3 million in support from the US Department of Energy Office of Science.