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.

Quantum entanglement occurs when two particles appear to communicate without a physical connection, a phenomenon Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” Nearly 90 years later, a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated the viability of a “quantum entanglement witness” capable of proving the presence of entanglement between magnetic particles, or spins, in a quantum material.