Scientists at Penn State and Columbia University say this discovery could lead to advances in technologies like batteries and sensors.
“We weren’t even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn’t understand — and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none,” said Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author on the paper, in a statement.