The mystery behind the peculiar metal-insulator transition exhibited by certain materials under external stimuli such as temperature, pressure, electric fields has been decoded by scientists, paving the way towards designing functional materials and devices like sensors and actuators.
Materials primarily exist in one of the two fundamental electronic states: metallic or insulating. However, certain materials exhibit the remarkable ability to transition between these two states under external stimuli such as temperature, pressure, electric fields, and more. Since the initial discovery of this phenomenon in magnetite in 1939, the transition between the metal-insulator phases (MIT) has continued to captivate generations of scientists and engineers. Their foray into this area has offered critical scientific insights and applications in various devices and at the same time brought in the necessity of new materials that can exhibit metal-insulator phase transition for industrial applications.
Chromium nitride (CrN) is an example of such a material, wherein the metal-insulator transition is anticipated to be instigated by an unconventional force arising from the anisotropic magnetic stress. However, the mechanism remained experimentally unverified even with the theoretical prediction for nearly two decades.
A team from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) has experimentally demonstrated that magnetic stress that stems from the peculiar arrangement of atomic spin drives the simultaneous structural, magnetic, and metal-insulator transition.
