Stanford PhD researcher Dr. Aaron Breidenbach discovered natural Herbertsmithite crystals in an abandoned Chilean mine, purer than any lab-grown equivalent, with direct implications for quantum spin liquid research.
Key Takeaways
Herbertsmithite is a quantum spin liquid (QSL) candidate; natural crystals from the San Francisco mine near Sierra Gorda show a Cu:Zn ratio of 2.98:1.02, closer to the ideal 3:1 than the best synthetic 3.15:0.85.
A single boulder yielded an estimated 10+ grams of crystal – roughly 10x the yield of a $10,000+ lab synthesis that takes 9 months and succeeds only 45% of the time.
Excess zinc (vs. excess copper in synthetics) means near-zero magnetic interlayer impurities, which would eliminate the largest ambiguity in neutron scattering data and could directly confirm a gapped QSL state.
A gapped QSL is inherently fault-tolerant to perturbations; if confirmed, this has direct implications for topological quantum computing architectures built on these materials.
Identity confirmed via powder X-ray scattering at Universidad Católica del Norte; composition is ~65% Herbertsmithite with Atacamite and Zn-Paratacamite, though exact ratios require further measurement.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged a disclosure risk: naming the specific mine type and desert region in the title may accelerate mineral extraction before the author can secure property or collection rights.
Chile’s chronic underfunding of science (~0.4% GDP vs. OECD ~2.7%) came up as context; the discovery involved a University of Chile anthropologist, highlighting cross-disciplinary fieldwork as a structural advantage.
Conceptual confusion around quantum spin liquids surfaced, with one commenter questioning how collapsed singlet states coexist with superimposed ones without cascading decoherence – a real open question in the literature.
Notable Comments
@sneilan1: warns the title effectively signals where to look, giving a head start to anyone who wants to extract crystals before the author secures rights.
@ticulatedspline: raises a concrete physics question about whether a defined spin in a collapsed singlet acts as an observation that collapses neighboring superimposed states.
