Single crystals exhibiting glass-like thermal conductivity are exceptionally rare because of the fundamentally different heat conduction mechanisms and atomic structures between crystals and glasses. Typically, above the Debye temperature, the thermal conductivities of crystals decrease with increasing temperature until they asymptotically approach a lower limit. In contrast, the thermal conductivities of amorphous materials increase with rising temperature due to their lack of long-range order.

Multiferroic materials are a class of multifunctional materials that exhibit both ferroelectricity and magnetic ordering. Traditional multiferroic materials are typically classified into two categories. In type-I multiferroics, ferroelectricity originates from orbital degeneracy lifting due to broken crystal symmetry, resulting in weak magnetoelectric coupling between spontaneous polarization and magnetic order. In type-II multiferroics, magnetic order and polarization are directly correlated via spin-orbit coupling mechanisms, such as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which theoretically enables high magnetoelectric coupling coefficients. However, in most transition metal compounds, the strength of spin-orbit coupling is relatively weak (on the order of ~10 meV), making it challenging to achieve large magnetoelectric coupling coefficients.

The recipients of the 11th Chinese Chemical Society-Royal Society of Chemistry Young Chemist Award were recently announced by the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), with Liu Leo LIU, Associate Professor of the Department of Chemistry at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), being recognized with this honor.

Symmetry has become a central dogma in modern science, guiding its development in many aspects. Symmetry breaking, especially spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), by which a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric or lower-symmetry state without explicitly introducing symmetry-breaking terms, has played an indispensable role in the developments of many branches of modern physics, such as high energy and condensed matter physics.

Magnons are the elementary excitations of typical magnetically ordered systems, and their interactions often lead to a plethora of emergent phenomena. In his seminal work, physicist Hans Bethe pointed out the possibility of forming two-magnon bound states in a spin chain. Later, this concept was generalized to higher dimensions by Wotis and Hanus. As an analogue of Cooper pairs in superconductors, it has been predicted theoretically that the BEC of two-magnon bound states corresponds to a quantum phase transition into a new state of matter, often termed as the spin nematic (SN) state. The SN state is a type of “hidden order” that breaks the spin rotational symmetry while having zero dipolar magnetic moments.

The atomic nucleus, as a quantum many-body system, has always been a central topic in nuclear physics due to its complex structure. The strong interactions between nucleons not only form traditional structures such as spherical and deformed nuclei but also give rise to more exotic forms, such as neutron halo nuclei and cluster structures. The emergence of these exotic structures often accompanies the breaking of local symmetry, which may trigger collective excitation phenomena like dipole resonance, serving as a unique probe for exploring the internal dynamics of atomic nuclei.