Hongrui Zhang

At first glance, a city of blocks looks orderly, but its rhythm is set not by the streets themselves but by the houses that line them. In cuprates, layered copper oxides, a mysterious periodicity of eight unit cells (8a0) has long been observed, as if the streets were laid out with a spacing of 8.

Picture an orchestra in which violins and trumpets play different parts but together create a powerful sound. In a crystal of the layered magnet Fe5GeTe2 doped with nickel, tiny regions of a different phase, Fe6GeTe2 nanoprecipitates, take on the role of those instruments. It is they, not the nickel itself, that keep the material magnetic at 478 kelvin, that is, at 205 degrees Celsius.