* In 1985, Harry Kroto and co-workers discovered a class of closed-cage carbon molecules known as fullerenes. Buckminsterfullerene (C), which has icosahedral symmetry, becomes JT-active upon addition or removal of one electron. The ordering of energy levels may not be the same as that predicted by Hund's rule.
* Discovery in 1986 by Bednorz and Müller of superconductivity in cuprates with a transition temperature of 35 K, which was higher than the upper limit allowed according to standard BCS theory, was motivated by earlier work by Müller on JT ions in crystals.    
*Colossal magnetoresistance, a property of manganese-based perovskites and other materials, has been explained in terms of competition between dynamic Jahn–Teller and double-exchange effects.
*Peierls theorem, which states that a one-dimensional equally spaced chain of ions with one electron per ion is unstable, has common roots with the JT effect.