Dispersive triplon excitations in engineered quantum magnets

Amazing stuff! Not easy to wrap your head around.

"... In the new study, the team used small organic molecules to create an artificial quantum material with unusual magnetic properties. Each of the cobalt-phthalocyanine molecules used in the experiment contains two frontier electrons. ... 'We use these molecules to bundle electrons together, we pack them into a tight space and force them to interact,' ... 'Looking into such a molecule from the outside, we will see the joint physics of both electrons. Because our fundamental building block now contains two electrons, rather than one, we see a very different kind of physics.' ..."

From the abstract:

"Quantum magnets provide a powerful platform to explore complex quantum many-body phenomena. One example is triplon excitations, exotic many-body modes emerging from propagating singlet-triplet transitions. We engineer a minimal quantum magnet from organic molecules and demonstrate the emergence of dispersive triplon modes in one- and two-dimensional assemblies probed with scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. Our results provide the first demonstration of dispersive triplon excitations from a real-space measurement."

Research group detects a quantum entanglement wave for the first time using real-space measurements | ScienceDaily Triplons are tricky little things. Experimentally, they're exceedingly difficult to observe. And even then, researchers usually conduct the tests on macroscopic materials, in which measurements are expressed as an average across the whole sample.

Real-space imaging of dispersive triplon excitations in engineered quantum magnets (open access)