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Updated: Jun 4, 2026

Fabricating van der Waals Heterostructures with Precise Rotational Alignment
Published on: July 5, 2019
Rotational symmetry breaking in the hidden-order phase of URu2Si2
R Okazaki1, T Shibauchi, H J Shi
1Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.
Abstract:
A second-order phase transition is characterized by spontaneous symmetry breaking. The nature of the broken symmetry in the so-called "hidden-order" phase transition in the heavy-fermion compound URu(2)Si(2), at transition temperature T(h) = 17.5 K, has posed a long-standing mystery. We report the emergence of an in-plane anisotropy of the magnetic susceptibility below T(h), which breaks the four-fold rotational symmetry of the tetragonal URu(2)Si(2). Two-fold oscillations in the magnetic torque under in-plane field rotation were sensitively detected in small pure crystals. Our findings suggest that the hidden-order phase is an electronic "nematic" phase, a translationally invariant metallic phase with spontaneous breaking of rotational symmetry.
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