My time with the James Analytis group in the summer of 2021 was fun!

I met a lot of great scientists and learned chemical vapor transport, heat capacity, magnetization, and more. Each group meeting is active and interesting and stimulates great discussion. Above all, I appreciated the freedom. In the beginning, James asked me what I wanted to grow and measure. I took a look at what interested me and found a crystal, grew it, and measured it. Having the freedom to choose my research path was frighteningly freeing. I found a crystal, improved on its growth, and am able to characterize it.

However, I am having a difficult time progressing the characterization of my experiment. It is supposed to realize an Axionic Insulating phase but the literature indicates that I need to measure the resistivity and discover zero Hall plateau in this insulating phase (assumed to be at room temperature). The problem is that my crystal is so insulating that I cannot even begin to measure that at room temperature. A commond trend [cite] is that the resistivity grows with decreasing pressure, so it gets harder and harder to measure as we approach 0 K. Even if I measure such a signal, it may come from the fact that there is no topological order at all! At the moment, I am investigating the possible effect of pressure on the system– perhaps pursuing is a better word. I have to wait another two weeks to be able to use the pressure cell that has been set up. In the meantime, I am going a little research stir crazy.

One possible route I could pursue is constructing heterostructures with FM materials or trying to do spin transport. But it is a little hard to justify doing that without even a single resistance characterization. We’ll see how that goes!

A few things that have been bothering me about my work. I feel:

  • The work is slow and not much can be done in a week’s time. It is slowly driving me crazy. k

  • The other grad students/post-docs aren’t as interested in my material so it is harder to have a mentor or friend in this journey.

  • I may be in a field that is dying. It is getting harder and harder to justify spending my time on this material and showing it is an axion insulator when other materials have already been found. I guess this is the struggle of the unknown.

None of these are red-flags but they do indicate to me that something needs to change. Maybe it is my approach or finding the right problem to focus on. I feel like I am flitting in the wind a bit. Perhaps my fall doing computational research with Zalatel will prove different.