Also called cerium silicide iodide
Heavy-fermion physics, where localised f electrons hybridise with conduction electrons and make quasiparticles hundreds of times heavier than a free electron, used to require bulk intermetallic crystals. CeSiI brings it into the van der Waals world: it exfoliates, and the heavy-fermion behaviour survives into the ultrathin limit, so Kondo screening can now be gated, strained and stacked like any other 2D material.
Readiness runs lab → prototype → pilot → deployed.
Short notes for specialists. Choose a lens in the header and yours comes first.
A Kondo lattice in a layered geometry: f moments on cerium, conduction electrons in the same slab, and weak interlayer coupling that makes the problem genuinely two-dimensional. Strong spin–orbit coupling gives the local moments a multipolar character, so the effective pseudospins are not simple spin-1/2, and first-principles work has to supply Kondo-lattice parameters rather than assume them. The competition between magnetic exchange between f electrons and Kondo coupling to the conduction sea is the axis along which the phase diagram runs, and in 2D both are tunable by gating.
Air sensitivity dominates the workflow: everything from exfoliation to contacts belongs in a glovebox, with encapsulation for transport. Compare bulk and nanoflake data on the same batch, because thickness and degradation both reduce the signature of heavy quasiparticles. Report the residual resistivity ratio and the temperature at which the resistivity turns over, since that is the marker of coherence.
No device role. The point is scientific: it puts strongly correlated f-electron physics on the same experimental footing as graphene stacks, where gating and stacking are routine.
The newest items tagged CeSiI, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
CeSiI is a van der Waals heavy-fermion metal recently found to exhibit unconventional superconductivity near a pressure-induced antiferromagnetic quantum critical point (QCP) at Pc =6 GPa. Here, we report a comprehensive single-crystal X-ray diffraction study of CeSiI under high pressures up to 8.3 GPa at room…
We report neutron, X-ray absorption, and resonant X-ray spectroscopy of magnetic excitations in the new heavy-fermion van-der-Waals superconductor CeSiI. We determined effective Hamiltonians and ground states of crystal electric fields and magnons. Isotropic Heisenberg interactions on a quasi two dimensional lattice…
CeSiI is a newly discovered exfoliable van der Waals (vdW) heavy-fermion metal featured by a long-range antiferromagnetic (AF) order (TN =7.5 K) inside the Kondo coherent state below T* = 50 K. To gain a more profound understanding of the intriguing physics of this material and to uncover novel phenomena driven by…
All 3 items tagged CeSiI in the news feed · RSS feed for CeSiI