Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
The material used in this research has been known to exist in two forms. The conducting state, which conducts electricity, and the insulating state, which does not. Under natural conditions, both forms have a slightly different arrangement of atoms and it takes energy to go from one to the other. The researchers found that when shocked electrically, these materials enter a transient conducting state in which they go from electrically insulating to conducting without changes to the atomic arrangement.