Ulrich Kentsch

A potter uses a sharp stylus to trace a pattern on a still-damp clay tile. One wrong move, and the line blurs, the tile cracks. Physicists work with films of the high-temperature superconductor YBCO (a compound of yttrium, barium, copper, and oxygen) in much the same way.

In the layered crystal CrSBr, the magnetic moments of atoms are arranged like notes in a score: within each layer they point in the same direction, but between layers they point in opposite directions. This antiferromagnetic melody plays up to 132 kelvin, beyond which thermal motion destroys the order.