Observation of novel behavior in magnetic material suggests fresh approach to studying fundamental quantum phenomena
The name Higgs has been the talk of the town this year, since the elusive 'Higgs boson'—an elementary particle that, among other things, endows other particles with mass—was discovered in the CERN research facility. Now, an international research team including Shigeki Onoda of the Condensed Matter Theory Laboratory, RIKEN Advanced Science Institute, Wako, Japan, has provided strong evidence that the same basic mechanism—the so-called Higgs mechanism—that endows particles with mass, is also at play in an entirely different system, namely a magnet. Their finding establishes a solid-state material as a versatile platform for studying the Higgs mechanism and related phenomena and may also lead to important technological advances in the field of spintronics.