an entirely new phase are the electron orientations of atoms, or "spins," described by their quantum state as "up" or "down."

Now, scientists at Stanford, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Institute for Solid State Physics (University of Tokyo) have discovered that at the abrupt lowest temperature transition at which the silicate enters a new state—called the quantum critical point—the three-dimensional material "loses" a dimension to form a Flatland, of sorts. Just as in the 1884 novella Flatland that posited a planar world, the spins strongly interact only in two dimensions. Effects from the third dimension are negligible. Their work appears in the June 1 issue of Nature.

First author Suchitra Sebastian of the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials and of the Applied Physics Department conducted the experiments for herdoctoral dissertation in collaboration with co-authors Ian Fisher, an assistant professor of applied physics at Stanford who was Sebastian's thesis adviser; scientist Neil Harrison, who was on Sebastian's thesis committee, and scientist Marcelo Jaime, postdoctoral fellow Peter Sharma and theorist Cristian Batista, all of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) at its Los Alamos National Laboratory campus; scientist Luis Balicas of the NHMFL's Florida State University campus; and Associate Professor Naoki Kawashima of the University of Tokyo.

"We have shown, for the first time, that the collective behavior in a bulk three-dimensional material can actually occur in just two dimensions," Fisher said. "Low dimensionality is a key ingredient in many exotic theories that purport to account for various poorly understood phenomena, including high-temperature superconductivity, but until now there