Scientists discover a new material that’s not quite, well, normal

IT’S A METAL, A SEMIMETAL

Scientists have been playing with quantum materials for a few years now, but there’s a new one in town. Quantum materials usually behave in strange ways that physics can’t explain, and the new addition is no exception. The international team of scientists behind the discovery have christened the material Weyl-Kondo semimetal with progress on the research being made on both sides of the Atlantic. Physical experiments were being carried out in Vienna, while theoretical studies were being conducted at Rice University in Houston, and the two teams “stumbled upon a model” in which the mass of the material dropped to zero. The researchers say that the particles of the Weyl-Kondo semimetal originate due to a phenomenon called Kondo Effect, hence the name, and hope the new material will find technological applications in future, especially in quantum computing.