Cobalt hides a network of quantum states that survive at room temperature – Martin Cid Magazine

TV

Movies

Tech

Music

Business

Science

FIFA World Cup 2026

Art

More

Theater

Books

Style

People

History

Worldwide News

Health

Sports

Motor

English

English

Español

Deutsch

Français

Dansk

हिन्दी

Italiano

日本語

한국어

Norsk bokmål

Polski

Português (PT)

Português (BR)

Română

Русский

Svenska

Türkçe

Tiếng Việt

简体中文

繁體中文

Español (Latinoamérica)

Press Enter to Search

By<br>Peter Finch

6 June 2026, 7:30 am<br>· 3 min read

Cobalt is one of the most thoroughly studied magnets on Earth, the kind of element that fills textbooks and turns up in everything from batteries to jet engines. Physicists at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin have now found that it has been hiding a dense network of exotic electronic states, and that the network holds together at room temperature.

The states are known as magnetic nodal lines. They are places where two streams of electrons, sorted by the direction of their spin, cross without colliding, tracing continuous paths through the crystal instead of meeting at single points. Such features belong to topology, the branch of physics that describes properties built so deeply into a material’s structure that ordinary disturbances cannot erase them. In cobalt, the team found these crossings woven throughout the metal rather than confined to a rare corner of it.

What makes the result striking is not only that the states exist, but that they survive the warmth of an ordinary room. Most of the quantum behavior physicists chase appears only near absolute zero, where heat is stripped away and fragile effects can finally be seen. Cobalt’s nodal lines persist hundreds of degrees higher, which is the difference between a laboratory curiosity and something a real device could use.<br>Recommended ReadingAlbert Einstein

To see them, the researchers used spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, a technique that knocks electrons out of a material with light and records both their energy and the direction of their spin. They ran it at BESSY II, a synchrotron in Berlin that produces the intense, finely tuned light the measurement demands. The added resolution let them trace cobalt’s electronic structure in far more detail than earlier work, which is how a network that had gone unnoticed for decades finally came into view.

"This is exactly the kind of switch on-off functionality sought for practical applications," said Jaime Sanchez-Barriga, who led the international team. Because the states are tied to cobalt’s magnetism, flipping the direction of a magnetic field can steer them, a handle engineers want for spintronics, a style of electronics that encodes information in electron spin rather than charge and promises faster, cooler chips.

The work is a measurement of a material’s properties, not a working device, and that gap is wide. Mapping topological states in a crystal under a synchrotron beam is a long way from building a chip that exploits them at scale, and other groups will need to reproduce the result and test whether the effect holds outside carefully prepared samples. The authors describe cobalt as a tunable platform to explore, not a finished technology.

Still, part of the appeal is precisely that cobalt is so ordinary. A material already mined, refined, and manufactured at industrial scale would be far easier to adopt than the rare or delicate compounds that dominate quantum research.

The findings appeared in the journal Communications Materials. The team plans to map how the nodal lines respond as the magnetic field is rotated, the next step toward learning whether cobalt’s hidden architecture can be put to work.

Tags: physics

Share This Post

More Like This<br>Under anesthesia, the brain kept decoding speech and predicting the next word

Perseid Meteor Shower – Watch It Live

NASA Television to Air Space Station Cargo Ship Launch, Docking

Encouraging Results at the First Natural History Sale in Paris

132 Stone Age genomes near Paris link plague to Europe’s Neolithic collapse

Total Lunar Eclipse on View May 15-16

Discussion

There are 0 comments.

Show / Write Comments

Most Read

Documentaries<br>Michael Jackson: The Verdict — Netflix reopens the trial everyone judged and almost no one watched

Documentaries<br>Rafa on Netflix is less about 22 Grand Slams than the body that paid for them

Music<br>Boards of Canada return with Inferno, an 18-track challenge to their own mythology

Documentaries<br>Room to Move on Netflix — a dancer rereads three decades of her own body after autism at 33

Documentaries<br>The Bus: A French Football Mutiny — Netflix opens the dressing room France closed at Knysna