The rapid increase in antibiotic resistant pathogenic bacteria has become a global threat, which besides the development of new drugs, requires rapid, cheap, scalable, and accurate diagnostics. Label free biosensors relying on electrochemical, mechanical, and mass based detection of whole bacterial cells have attempted to meet these requirements. However, the trade-off between selectivity and sensitivity of such sensors remains a key challenge. In particular, point-of-care diagnostics that are able to reduce and/or prevent unneeded antibiotic prescriptions require highly specific probes with sensitive and accurate transducers that can be miniaturized and multiplexed, and that are easy to operate and cheap. Towards  [ Read More ]

Significant efforts have focused on the magnetic excitations of relativistic Mott insulators, predicted to realize the Kitaev quantum spin liquid (QSL). This exactly solvable model involves a highly entangled state resulting from bond-dependent Ising interactions that produce excitations which are non-local in terms of spin flips. A key challenge in real materials is identifying the relative size of the non-Kitaev terms and their role in the emergence or suppression of fractional excitations. Here, we identify the energy and temperature boundaries of non-Kitaev interactions by direct comparison of the Raman susceptibility of α-RuCl3 with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results for the Kitaev QSL.  [ Read More ]

Van der Waals (vdW) materials with magnetic order have been heavily pursued for fundamental physics as well as for device design. Despite the rapid advances, so far, they are mainly insulating or semiconducting, and none of them has a high electronic mobility—a property that is rare in layered vdW materials in general. The realization of a high-mobility vdW material that also exhibits magnetic order would open the possibility for novel magnetic twistronic or spintronic devices. Here, we report very high carrier mobility in the layered vdW antiferromagnet GdTe3. The electron mobility is beyond 60,000 cm/Vs , which is the highest  [ Read More ]

Studies of topological semimetals have revealed spectacular transport phenomena spanning extreme magnetoresistance effects and ultrahigh mobilities. As phonon dynamics and electron-phonon scattering play a critical role in the electrical and thermal transport, we pursue a fundamental understanding of these effects in type-I Weyl semimetals NbAs and TaAs. In the temperature-dependent Raman spectra of NbAs we reveal a previously unreported Fano line shape, a signature stemming from the electron-phonon interaction. Additionally, the temperature dependence of the A1 phonon linewidths in both NbAs and TaAs strongly deviate from the standard model of anharmonic decay. To capture the mechanisms responsible for the observed Fano asymmetry  [ Read More ]

Combining topology and superconductivity providesa powerful tool for investigating fundamental physics as well as aroute to fault-tolerant quantum computing. There is mountingevidence that the Fe-based superconductor FeTe0.55Se0.45 (FTS)may also be topologically nontrivial. Should the superconductingorder be s±, then FTS could be a higher order topologicalsuperconductor with helical hinge zero modes (HHZMs). To testthe presence of these modes, we have fabricated normal-metal/superconductor junctions on different surfaces via 2D atomic crystalheterostructures. As expected, junctions in contact with the hingereveal a sharp zero bias anomaly that is absent when tunnelingpurely into the c-axis. Additionally, the shape and suppression withtemperature are consistent with highly coherent modes  [ Read More ]