The 2016 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to physicists who used the mathematical concept of “topology" to explain the exotic behaviour of certain materials. There is increasing interest in these “topological" materials, which may hold the key to next generation computing devices based on spintronics. Materials that exhibit long-range magnetic order in combination with topologically nontrivial band structures are particularly sought after.
An international team of researchers used powder neutron diffraction data collected on the WISH instrument, alongside other experiments, to demonstrate that a rich variety of different topological states can exist in a single material, CeSbTe. Their discovery introduces a realistic and promising platform for studying the interplay of magnetism and topology.
Related publication: L. M. Schoop et at. “Tunable Weyl and Dirac states in the nonsymmorphic compound CeSbTe" Sci. Adv. 4(2018), eaar2317, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar2317
