A New State of Quantum Matter Naoto Nagaosa Science 318, 758 (2007); DOI: 10.1126/science.

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PERSPECTIVES
lation will predominate, and more and more ST-KaiC will build up. As the concentration of ST-KaiC increases, S-KaiC will increase too. The increasing S-KaiC will sequester more and more KaiA, which increases the rate of formation of S-KaiC. This then causes more sequestration of KaiA, and so on. Eventually dephosphorylation dominates, and the system is driven back to unphosphorylated KaiC. What, then, flips the KaiA/S-KaiC switch back to release KaiA and favor phosphorylation? With KaiA sequestered, S-KaiC formation cannot be maintained indefinitely; the rate of S-KaiC production from its immediate precursor ST-KaiC will eventually slow down as ST-KaiC becomes depleted. This effect is the equivalent of a slow negative-feedback loopan increase in S-KaiC concentration decreases the amount of ST-KaiC, which decreases the rate of formation of S-KaiC. Thus, the circadian oscillator system can be thought of as a bistable switch, toggled first by the slow accumulation of S-KaiC and then by a slow negative-feedback loop. This type of circuit can oscillate, as Rust et al. demonstrate through a simple differential equation model whose parameters are constrained by their experimental observations. At first glance, the circadian oscillator of eukaryotes does not seem to work in the same way. It is composed mainly of transcriptional regulators and directed protein degradation (6), rather than a stoichiometrically controlled autophosphorylating adenosine triphosphatase like KaiC, and none of the eukaryotic components have any sequence homology to KaiA, KaiB, or KaiC. On the other hand, the design principles of the two oscillators may be quite similar. Both circuits include doublenegative-feedback loops that might function as bistable triggers, and both include slow negative-feedback loops (8). In terms of systems-level logic, these oscillators appear more similar than different. Maybe this is how a successful circadian oscillator has to be built.
References
1. M. Nakajima et al., Science 308, 414 (2005). 2. T. Nishiwaki et al., EMBO J. 26, 4029 (2007). 3. M. J. Rust, J. S. Markson, W. S. Lane, D. S. Fisher, E. K. OShea, Science 318, 809 (2007); published online 4 October 2007 (10.1126/science.1148596). 4. J. E. Ferrell Jr., R. R. Bhatt, J. Biol. Chem. 272, 19008 (1997). 5. Y. Zhao, Z. Y. Zhang, J. Biol. Chem. 276, 32382 (2001). 6. S. M. Reppert, D. R. Weaver, Nature 418, 935 (2002). 10.1126/science.1150740

PHYSICS

A New State of Quantum Matter

Naoto Nagaosa

Experiments show that electron spins can flow without dissipation in a novel electrical insulator.

lectrons have a property known as spin, and these spins can be controlled and directed by applied electric and magnetic fields. In recent years, researchers in the relatively young field of spintronics have explored this effect for applications in microelectronics [reviewed in (1)]. The goal is to control and use spins much as todays integrated circuits use the property of electric charge for computing operations. On page 766 of this issue, Knig et al. (2) report experimental results that show the existence of a new state of matter that may take spintronics even further. Not only does this work offer us a look at fundamentally new physical phenomena, it may also allow the development of novel spintronics devices. Many researchers have explored the socalled spin Hall effect as a possible route to spintronic applications. The original Hall effect goes back to the late 1800s, when Edwin Hall noticed that a voltage would form perpendicularly to a current flowing in a conductor in a magnetic field. In the quantum Hall effects, which were discovered in the 1980 and 1982, the electrical conductance takes on quantized values. In the spin Hall effect, the direction of the flow of electrons can be controlled, depending on whether the spin is up or down, by an

The author is in the Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan. E-mail: nagaosa@appi.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

and also in metallic systems (810). However, the detailed mechanism in these cases still Spin up needs to be scrutinized; the flow of charges can still be distorted by impurity scatterSpin down ing and thus contribute to the spin current. Therefore, we need to obtain clear obserQuantum Hall system Quantum spin Hall system vations of a truly dissipationless spin current. Spin control. In the conventional quantum Hall system (left), the Dissipationless flow is known applied magnetic field causes electrons to bounce off the edge of the to occur in the conventional sample in circular orbits, forming a net flow of charge around the boundary of the material. No magnetic field is needed, however, in quantum Hall effect, where the the quantum spin Hall system (right), where spin-up and spin-down electrons are deflected into circular paths by a magnetic field carriers flow in opposite directions in edge channel states. (see the left panel of the figure). applied electric field. The spin Hall effect was This motion is not random among electrons proposed theoretically long ago based on an but is coherently organized, leading to a collecextrinsic mechanism (3), in which impurities tive state. This state is stable because a finite in a material deflect the spin-up and spin-down amount of energy (the energy gap) is required electrons in opposite ways. However, recent to disturb it. In a real sample, the electrons interest has centered on an intrinsic form of bounce back from the edges, causing a net onespin Hall effect and the possibility of spin flow dimensional motion, which corresponds to a without energy dissipation. flow of current around the edge. Because the Instead of impurities, the intrinsic mecha- direction of this motion is one-way, it cannot nism relies on the interplay of the spin and be scattered backward, and so the dissipation orbital motion of the electrons in the perfect of the flow of charge is suppressed in the quanperiodic background of the crystal lattice, tum Hall system. leading to different paths for the up and down A crucial question is whether a similar spins. The theoretical proposals for this effect state is possible for the spin current. My col(4, 5) were followed by the experimental dis- leagues and I studied this question theoreticovery of the spin Hall effect in GaAs (6, 7) cally in 2004 (11), and we considered the spin
Magnetic field

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Hall conductivity for a band insulator with a finite band gap caused by the spin-orbit interaction. In this case, the electrons have a velocity transverse to the external electric field and a direction that depends on the spin. That is, the spin currents in the totally occupied bands do not cancel each other out, and finite spin Hall conductivity results even in the band insulator. This state was called a spin Hall insulator, and the candidate materials we proposed included HgTe, HgSe, HgS, PbTe, PbSe, and PbS. However, it was not clear how to fundamentally distinguish these materials from the usual band insulators. Kane and Mele (12, 13) achieved a breakthrough when they invented a model for graphene with spin-orbit interaction, which revealed an insulating state with robust helical edge modes, i.e., the modes with opposite spins have opposite directions of propagation. When the number of these helical edge modes is even, some perturbation induces the hybridization of these helical modes and hinders their propagation. This does not occur for an odd number of modes, where the propagation is stable and protected (see the right panel of the figure). The latter case corresponds to a new class of band insulator, i.e., the quantum spin Hall system, and the former to the usual insulator (12, 13). Soon after these results, Bernevig et al. (14) proposed a different way to create a quantum spin Hall system. They looked at the problem as a phase transition between the conventional insulator and the quantum spin Hall system. It turned out that the phase transition is accompanied by a band crossing, which changes the number of helical edge modes. Furthermore, they proposed a specific system, i.e., the quantum well of CdTe/HgTe/CdTe, where this phase transition could be induced by changing the thickness of the HgTe layer. This was a strong proposal and appealing enough to motivate experimentalists to try testing it. Knig et al. now report the experimental observation of these robust helical edge modes. They fabricated quantum well structures and changed the thickness d of the HgTe layer. As d increases, the energy gap decreases and eventually collapses at a critical thickness of dc = 6.3 nm. This gap closing corresponds to the quantum phase transition between the usual insulator at d < dc and quantum spin Hall state at d > dc. Knig et al. confirmed this by measuring the expected quantized charge conductance consistently with a helical mode for each of the two edges, while observing a much smaller conductance at smaller thickness, indicating the usual insulating state. This conclusion is further reinforced by the magnetic field dependence of the charge conductance. The conductance should show a rapid decrease as the magnetic field B increases, which Knig et al. also observed experimentally. In this case, the authors did not directly measure the spin Hall conductance, which is not quantized. This is because, unlike the charge, the total spin is not a conserved quantity in the presence of the spin-orbit interaction. Therefore, although the search for the intrinsic spin Hall effect in the insulator leads to a new classification of the electron states in solids, the implications for the magneto-transport properties still remain to be studied. The impact of this work will be far-reaching because it has revealed that there are fundamentally different kinds of insulators. Even after 80 years, the band theory of materials still has new and surprising aspects. A more complete classification scheme for these unusual insulating states is now being constructed, including the three-dimensional systems (15). Eventually, the quantum spin Hall system might enable the design of spin current circuits without dissipation, which will open up new possibilities in spintronics.
References and Notes
1. S. A. Wolf et al., Science 294, 1488 (2001). 2. M. Knig et al., Science 318, 766 (2007); published online 20 September 2007 (10.1126/science.1148047). 3. M. I. Dyakonov, V. I. Perel, JETP Lett. 13, 467 (1971). 4. S. Murakami, N. Nagaosa, S.-C. Zhang, Science 301, 1348 (2003). 5. J. Sinova et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 126603 (2004). 6. Y. K. Kato, R. C. Myers, A. C. Gossard, D. D. Awschalom, Science 306, 1910 (2004). 7. J. Wunderlich, B. Kaestner, J. Sinova, T. Jungwirth, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 047204 (2005). 8. S. O. Valenzuela, M. Tinkham, Nature 442, 176 (2006). 9. E. Saitoh, M. Ueda, H. Miyajima, G. Tatara, Appl. Phys. Lett. 88, 182509 (2006). 10. T. Kimura et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 249901 (2007). 11. S. Murakami, N. Nagaosa, S.-C. Zhang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 156804 (2004). 12. C. L. Kane, E. J. Mele, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 146802 (2005). 13. C. L. Kane, E. J. Mele, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 226801 (2005). 14. B. A. Bernevig, T. L. Hughes, S.-C. Zhang, Science 314, 1757 (2006). 15. L. Fu, C. L. Kane, Phys. Rev. B 76, 045302 (2007). 16. I acknowledge financial support from the Grant-in-Aids under grant numbers 15104006, 16076205, and 17105002, and National Research Grid Initiative Nanoscience Project from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan. 10.1126/science.1150199

ASTRONOMY

Mining for the Ephemeral

Geoffrey C. Bower A new generation of telescopes is helping researchers explore transient energetic processes outside our Galaxy.

bserved at radio wavelengths, the sky has revealed in recent years that it plays host to a zoo of variable and transient sources that pulse, flicker, burst, and burp. In the most recent manifestation of such ephemeral phenomena, Lorimer et al. (1) report on page 777 of this issue the discovery of a single radio burst so intense that it overloaded the detector of the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. The authors argue that the burst originated outside of the Galaxy, possibly at a distance of more than 1 billion light years. This indicates an enormous and unprecedented luminosity as well as possibly providing a new method for studying the intergalactic medium (IGM), one of the most poorly characterized constituents of the universe. More detections could give the first complete census of baryons (i.e., particles such as protons and

The author is in the Department of Astronomy, University of California, 601 Campbell Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: gbower@astro.berkeley.edu

neutrons) in the IGM, which is believed to account for 90% of the total baryons in the universe. On the basis of the small sliver of sky and the limited sampling time that led to this discovery, it appears that hundreds of similar events occur throughout the sky every day. The burst heralds a new era of transient discovery at radio and other wavelengths, driven by new telescopes and advanced technology for performing and analyzing enormous surveys of the sky. In the past century, astronomers escaped the limited spectrum visible to the human eye and developed instruments capable of observing wavelengths from radio waves to gamma rays. As a result, researchers have made numerous discoveries including the microwave background, pulsars, massive black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. Although the static sky has not been fully explored, the objects that vary over time represent the new terra incognita of astronomy. The available parameter space is vast: Transient events are observed at all wavelengths, in a wide variety

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