Beamline 10.0.1 at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source is optimized for studies of topological properties in materials. (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)
While using X-rays generated by the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a synchrotron facility at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to study a bismuth-containing thermoelectric material that can convert heat into electricity, physicist M. Zahid Hasan of Princeton University saw that something was interfering with the anticipated view of electrons' behavior inside the material. Knowing how electrons move within this material was sought as a key to decipher how it worked, so this interference'which he and his team observed more than a decade ago during an experiment employing an X-ray-based technique dubbed ARPES (angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy)?was a problem .. at first. 'Since 2004, I was involved with this research looking for a better understanding of bismuth-based thermoelectric materials, among other things,' said Hasan. Around 2007, after completing more X-ray experiments at the ALS and other synchrotrons, and after gaining some understanding of the theory related to his team's observations, it would become clear to Hasan that this obstruction was actually a discovery: One that would spark a revolution in materials research that continues today, and that could eventually lead to new generations of electronics and quantum technologies. Topological matter research is now a flourishing field of research at the ALS, with several staff members devoted to supporting X-ray techniques that largely focus on the properties of topological matter.
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