Physicists have produced an electronic structure known as a flat band in a three-dimensional material for the first time. The flat band was created by trapping an electron within a crystal called a pyrochlore, and an international team led by Joseph Checkelsky and Riccardo Comin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, used it to transform the material into a superconductor. As well as superconductivity, the material could offer a platform for studying other physics that arises from strongly correlated electrons, including novel forms of magnetism and electronic symmetry breaking. What is more, the team say the flat-band state could, in principle, appear in other combinations of atoms, provided the atoms occupy an arrangement known as a line graph lattice.
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