New research numerically demonstrates how carefully structured materials can control light in ways that are both precise and robust. It brings together ideas from photonics and topology to show how a laser can emerge from the boundary between two distinct optical regimes. The physical system considered in the study is a bilayer photonic crystal. A […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
Every time a computer processes information, electrons shuttle through circuits carrying electric charge, and much of the energy they carry is wasted as heat. Spintronics proposes a different approach: instead of relying solely on the charge of electrons, exploit another of their properties called spin, a quantum-mechanical quantity that can be thought of as a […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Electronic Properties • Materials • Quantum physics
Imagine taking two identical sheets of chicken wire and laying them on top of one another. If you align them perfectly, they look like a single sheet. But if you rotate the top layer by just a tiny amount, a beautiful large-scale crawling pattern emerges. In physics, we call this a Moiré pattern. When we […]
Imagine cooling a liquid so fast it turns into glass: a solid that’s jumbled inside, unlike neat crystal lattices. In 1948, Walter Kauzmann noticed a puzzle. As liquids cool, their entropy (a measure of disorder) drops faster than in crystals. Below a certain temperature, a supercooled liquid would have less entropy than the crystal, implying […]
When we peel a crystal down to its very last layer, the physics governing its behavior undergoes a radical shift. This transition from the bulk (three-dimensional) to the two-dimensional limit is where some of the most exotic phenomena in condensed matter physics emerge. Among these, Titanium Diselenide, or TiSe₂, has long fascinated researchers because of […]
In order to build the computers and devices of tomorrow, we have to understand how they use energy today. That’s harder than it sounds. Memory storage, information processing, and energy use in these technologies involve constant energy flow—systems never settle into thermodynamic balance. To complicate things further, one of the most precise ways to study […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
When we study solid-state physics, we usually begin with crystals. In a crystal, atoms repeat in a strict and regular pattern, much like tiles on a bathroom floor. Because every small region looks the same as every other, electrons move through a predictable landscape. This repeating order is the reason we can explain electricity, magnetism […]
A Univerity of Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and plasma physics […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
In the layered kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅, researchers have observed something that, until now, seemed almost impossible: robust quantum interference in the normal, non-superconducting state, persisting over distances of several micrometers. The interference is not the fragile single-particle kind seen in ultra-clean semiconductors at millikelvin temperatures. Instead, it behaves as if the entire stack of kagome […]
Imagine a sheet of material so incredibly thin it’s just one atom thick, yet it can capture and guide light in ways that defy our everyday intuition. This isn’t science fiction—it’s graphene, a wonder material made from carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Now, picture slicing this sheet into tiny ribbons, arranging them in […]