Recommendable! Amazing stuff! This is a long overview article.
"... a compound of ytterbium, rhodium, and silicon ... The sample belongs to a class of materials that physicists call “strange metals.” For 4 decades, they’ve puzzled over the fact that in these compounds, the standard theory of electricity just doesn’t work.
Recent experiments ... suggest that in strange metals, electrons lose their individuality. ... Instead, electric charge appears somehow to pass through the metal as a diffuse amorphous blob—like water without individual H2O molecules. Researchers are still debating the microscopic details of this bizarre picture. But it’s already clear that the stakes are higher than just understanding a dozen or so oddball materials. “It’s really a mysterious state with big consequences ...
The hallmark of strange metals is electrical resistivity that climbs higher than that of ordinary metals when they are warmed from low temperatures. They also lose their resistivity altogether, becoming superconductors, at lower temperatures—though above those of conventional superconductors. Some researchers believe this high-temperature superconductivity is simply the flip side of strange metallicity—that they’re two manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. ...
A theory that explains strange metals may force a fundamental rethinking of how electricity works in all materials. It might subsume the standard theory the way general relativity, with its curved spacetime, subsumed Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity—and prove just as unsettling. Strange metals are forcing physicists to ask whether the very idea of an electron, or any particle for that matter, is an oversimplification of what’s really going on. ..."
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