Well, this goes to my bragging rights as predictor ☺️

2) Deutsch, Shor, for their seminal contributions to quantum algorithms

Now, my wish list:
1) Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan Macdonald, for their seminal contributions to twistronics
2) Steve White, for inventing DMRG
3) Berry, for obvious reasons.

The CrI3 tubes are encapsulated in multiwall carbon nanotubes. So, it is a 1D Van der Waals heterostructure. DFT calculations predict spin-proximity effect in this system, so, transport may be used to probe single-tube magnetism.

This is a first-timer: a hollow tube made of a monolayer magnetic material, CrI3. This may open a new field of research. On the theory side, given the strong-plane off-plane anisotropy of CrI3, tubes are expected to feature a radial magnetic state. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Link to the experimental paper featured in the video.
journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

This work is yet another proof that nanographenes are ideal building blocks to create artificial spin lattices, explore quantum magnetism, and start thinking about ways to exploit it. I thank all my coworkers, funding agencies and the INL for making this research possible.

Building on that preprint, we relate the modulation of the zero bias Kondo peak observed in the nanographene chains with odd number of spins to the wave function of a single spinon standing wave. So, in this sense, we are taking a picture of an individual spinon.

Very much like protons are bound states of 3 quarks, the spin excitations of the spin chains are made of spinon pairs. Single spinons behave like free fermions, but is hard to observe them. In our work, we provide a proxy way to do so, inspired in this theory preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2303.02276

Using inelastic electron tunnel spectroscopy with scanning tunnel microscopes (IETS-STM), they measure the energy of the spin excitations as a function of the chain length. We have modelled their results. The spin excitations in this system are quite peculiar: they are bound states of spinons.

The Heisenberg model used to be a "textbook case" of mathematical physics and theoretical quantum magnetism. With our paper, it now becomes a textbook case of surface physics and organic chemistry. Our colleagues are able to fabricate many spin chains with different length.

At my group, the heavy lifting was done by , including PhD students, Joao Carlos Henriques and Mar Ferri.

We have studied antiferromagnetically coupled S=1/2 spin chains made with olympicenes, Olympic ring shaped nanographenes. They realize the so called Heisenberg spin model.

In contrast, spin excitations in the S=1/2 Heisenberg chains with OBC are not standing waves. Crucially, we find that whether or not the excitations of the open-end chains are wave packets of the PBC chains determines the capability to infer E(k) of spin excitations out of the FT of IETS.

Some elementary excitations, such as magnons in ferromagnetic chains and triplons in the alternate exchange Heisenberg chain, whose wave function in spin chains with open boundary conditions (OBC) are standing waves: linear combinations of pairs of states of the chains with periodic BC (PBC). 👇

Now, we can take the FT of that image and try to relate to the E(k) of the spin chains. There are several reasons why this may fail, but the fact is that, in some cases, it happens to work. That's what our preprint is all about. arxiv.org/abs/2502.13770. Our key findings are the following: 👇

The principle of inelastic electron spectroscopy (IETS) is that inelastic excitations appear as steps in the dI/dV curve for eV= E, where E is the energy of a given excitation. In spin chains, the magnitude of the step is different as the dI/dV is measured in different spins. This provide an image.