Do materials hide supersymmetry under discrete symmetries?

Researchers studied quantum critical points where fermions couple to ordered states with discrete symmetries—a setup more realistic for actual materials than the continuous symmetries usually assumed. Using renormalization group methods, they discovered that beyond a certain threshold, the discrete anisotropy becomes irrelevant, unveiling a hidden supersymmetric critical point. This creates two distinct length scales in the ordered phase, leading to a new scaling relation between correlation exponents.