Plutonium is one of the most complex elements in the periodic table. First synthesized and isolated in 1940 by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, plutonium has been studied closely for more than eight decades. It’s most often associated with its role in nuclear security, but it’s also vital to nuclear power, where it is produced in reactors and can be recycled as fuel. Despite plutonium’s importance, some of its most fundamental behaviors remain a mystery.
Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have made an important discovery: A compound called plutonium hexaboride (PuB₆) exhibits a one-of-a-kind quantum property known as a topological Kondo insulating state. Published in Physical Review Research, this finding marks one of only a handful of times such behavior has been observed in a plutonium material—opening a new window for research into how some of nature’s most complex elements actually work.
