Aurelia Butler

Researchers have directly observed Floquet effects in graphene for the first time, settling a long-running scientific debate. Their ultrafast light-based technique demonstrates that graphene’s electronic properties can be tuned almost instantaneously. This paves the way for custom-engineered quantum materials and new approaches in electronics and sensing. More

Princeton researchers found that the brain excels at learning because it reuses modular “cognitive blocks” across many tasks. Monkeys switching between visual categorization challenges revealed that the prefrontal cortex assembles these blocks like Legos to create new behaviors. This flexibility explains why humans learn quickly while AI models often forget old skills. The insights may help build better AI and new clinical treatments for impaired cognitive adaptability. More

Modern digital systems depend on information encoded in simple binary units of 0s and 1s. Any physical substance that can reliably switch between two different, stable configurations can in principle serve as a storage platform for that binary information.
Ferroic materials fall into this category. These solids can be toggled between two distinct states. Well-known examples include ferromagnets, which switch between opposite magnetic orientations, and ferroelectrics, which can hold opposing electric polarizations. Their ability to respond to magnetic or electric fields makes ferroic materials essential components in many modern electronic and data storage devices.
However, they are not without limitations: they are sensitive to external disturbances — such as strong magnetic fields near a hard drive — and their performance typically degrades over time. These challenges have motivated researchers to look for new storage approaches that are more resilient.
Ferroaxial Materials and Their Unusual Vortex States
Ferroaxial materials represent a newer branch of the ferroic family. Instead of relying on magnetic or electric polarization states, these materials contain vortices of electric dipoles. These vortices can point in two opposite directions while producing neither net magnetization nor net electric polarization. They are extremely stable and naturally resistant to external fields, but this same stability has made them very difficult to manipulate, limiting scientific progress in this area.
Using Terahertz Light to Switch Ferroaxial States
A team led by Andrea Cavalleri has now demonstrated a method to control these elusive states. The researchers used circularly polarized terahertz pulses to flip between clockwise and anti-clockwise ferroaxial domains in a material called rubidium iron dimolybdate (RbFe(MoO₄)2) .

“We take advantage of a synthetic effective field that arises when a terahertz pulse drives ions in the crystal lattice in circles,” explains lead author Zhiyang Zeng. “This effective field is able to couple to the ferroaxial state, just like a magnetic field would switch a ferromagnet or an electric field would reverse a ferroelectric state,” he added.
By changing the helicity, or twist, of the circularly polarized pulses, the team could stabilize either the clockwise or anti-clockwise arrangement of electric dipoles. As fellow author Michael Först notes, “in this way enabling information storage in the two ferroic states. Because ferroaxials are free from depolarizing electric or stray magnetic fields, they are extremely promising candidates for stable, non-volatile data storage.”
Implications for Future Ultrafast Information Technologies
“This is an exciting discovery that opens up new possibilities for the development of a robust platform for ultrafast information storage,” says Andrea Cavalleri. He adds that the work also highlights the growing importance of circular phonon fields, first demonstrated by the group in 2017, as a powerful tool for manipulating unconventional material phases.
This research was largely supported by the Max Planck Society and the Max-Planck Graduate Center for Quantum Materials, which fosters collaboration with the University of Oxford. Additional support comes from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Cluster of Excellence ‘CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter’. The MPSD is also a partner of the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) with DESY and the University of Hamburg. More

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found that the magnetic component of light plays a direct part in the Faraday Effect, overturning a 180-year belief that only light’s electric field was involved. Their work shows that light can exert magnetic influence on matter, not simply illuminate it. This insight could support advances in optics, spintronics, and emerging quantum technologies.
The team’s findings, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, show that the magnetic portion of light, not only its electric one, has a meaningful and measurable influence on how light interacts with materials. This result contradicts a scientific explanation that has shaped the understanding of the Faraday Effect since the nineteenth century.
The study, led by Dr. Amir Capua and Benjamin Assouline of the university’s Institute of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, offers the first theoretical evidence that the oscillating magnetic field of light contributes directly to the Faraday Effect. This effect describes how the polarization of light rotates as it travels through a material placed in a constant magnetic field.
How Light and Magnetism Interact
“In simple terms, it’s an interaction between light and magnetism,” says Dr. Capua. “The static magnetic field ‘twists’ the light, and the light, in turn, reveals the magnetic properties of the material. What we’ve found is that the magnetic part of light has a first-order effect, it’s surprisingly active in this process.”
For nearly two centuries, scientists attributed the Faraday Effect solely to the electric field of light interacting with electric charges in matter. The new study shows that the magnetic field of light also plays a direct role by interacting with atomic spins, a contribution long assumed to be insignificant.
Calculating the Magnetic Contribution
Using advanced calculations informed by the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation, which describes how spins behave in magnetic materials, the researchers demonstrated that light’s magnetic field can generate magnetic torque within a material in a manner similar to a static magnetic field. Capua explains, “In other words, light doesn’t just illuminate matter, it magnetically influences it.”

To measure the extent of that influence, the team applied their theoretical model to Terbium Gallium Garnet (TGG), a crystal commonly used to study the Faraday Effect. Their analysis revealed that the magnetic component of light is responsible for about 17% of the observed rotation in the visible spectrum and as much as 70% in the infrared.
New Pathways for Future Technologies
“Our results show that light ‘talks’ to matter not only through its electric field, but also through its magnetic field, a component that has been largely overlooked until now,” says Benjamin Assouline.
The researchers note that this revised understanding of light’s magnetic behavior could open doors for innovations in optical data storage, spintronics, and magnetic control using light. The work may also contribute to future developments in spin-based quantum computing. More

Scientists study matter under extreme conditions to uncover some of nature’s most fundamental behaviors. The Standard Model of particle physics contains the equations needed to describe these phenomena, but in many real situations such as fast-changing environments or extremely dense matter, those equations become too complex for even the most advanced classical supercomputers to handle.
Quantum computing offers a promising alternative because, in principle, it can represent and simulate these systems far more efficiently. A major challenge, however, is finding reliable methods to set up the initial quantum state that a simulation needs. In this work, researchers achieved a first: they created scalable quantum circuits capable of preparing the starting state of a particle collision similar to those produced in particle accelerators. Their test focuses on the strong interactions described by the Standard Model.
The team began by determining the required circuits for small systems using classical computers. Once those designs were known, they applied the circuits’ scalable structure to build much larger simulations directly on a quantum computer. Using IBM’s quantum hardware, they successfully simulated key features of nuclear physics on more than 100 qubits.
Scalable Quantum Methods for High-Density Physics
These scalable quantum algorithms open the door to simulations that were previously out of reach. The approach can be used to model the vacuum state before a particle collision, physical systems with extremely high densities, and beams of hadrons. Researchers anticipate that future quantum simulations built on these circuits will exceed what classical computing can accomplish.
Such simulations could shed light on major open questions in physics, including the imbalance of matter and antimatter, the creation of heavy elements inside supernovae, and the behavior of matter at ultra-high densities. The same techniques may also help model other difficult systems, including exotic materials with unusual quantum properties.
Nuclear physicists used IBM’s quantum computers to perform the largest digital quantum simulation ever completed. Their success stemmed in part from identifying patterns in physical systems, including symmetries and differences in length scales, which helped them design scalable circuits that prepare states with localized correlations. They demonstrated the effectiveness of this algorithm by preparing the vacuum state and hadrons within a one-dimensional version of quantum electrodynamics.

Advancing from Small Models to Large-Scale Quantum Systems
The team validated their circuit components by first testing them on small systems with classical computing tools, confirming that the resulting states could be systematically improved. They then expanded the circuits to handle more than 100 qubits and ran them on IBM’s quantum devices. Using the data from these simulations, scientists extracted properties of the vacuum with percent-level accuracy.
They also used the circuits to generate pulses of hadrons, then simulated how those pulses evolved over time to track their propagation. These advances point toward a future in which quantum computers can carry out full dynamical simulations of matter under extreme conditions that lie well beyond the reach of classical machines.
This research received support from the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) through the Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science Initiative, and the Quantum Science Center (QSC), a DOE and University of Washington National Quantum Information Science Research Center. Additional computing resources were provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, and by the Hyak supercomputer system at the University of Washington. The team also acknowledges the use of IBM Quantum services for this project. More

A research group at the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin has found a method to make dark excitons, a class of previously unseen light states, emit bright light and be controlled with nanoscale precision. The study, published November 12 in Nature Photonics, points toward future technologies that could operate faster, use less energy, and shrink to even smaller sizes.
Dark excitons form in ultra-thin semiconductor materials and normally remain undetectable because they release only faint light. Even so, scientists have long viewed them as promising for quantum information and advanced photonics because they interact with light in unusual ways, remain stable for relatively long periods, and experience less disruption from their surroundings, which helps reduce decoherence.
Amplifying Dark Excitons With Nanoscale Design
To bring these hidden states into view, the researchers created a tiny optical cavity built from gold nanotubes combined with a single layer of tungsten diselenide (WSe2), a material just three atoms thick. This structure increased the brightness of dark excitons by an extraordinary factor of 300,000, making them clearly observable and allowing their behavior to be precisely controlled.
“This work shows that we can access and manipulate light-matter states that were previously out of reach,” said principal investigator Andrea Alù, Distinguished and Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center and founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC). “By turning these hidden states on and off at will and controlling them with nanoscale resolution, we open exciting opportunities to disruptively advance next-generation optical and quantum technologies, including for sensing and computing.”
Electric and Magnetic Control of Hidden Quantum States
The team also demonstrated that these dark excitons can be switched and adjusted using electric and magnetic fields. This level of control could support new designs for on-chip photonics, highly sensitive detectors, and secure quantum communication. Importantly, the method preserves the original characteristics of the material while still achieving record-setting improvements in light-matter coupling.

“Our study reveals a new family of spin-forbidden dark excitons that had never been observed before,” said first author Jiamin Quan. “This discovery is just the beginning — it opens a path to explore many other hidden quantum states in 2D materials.”
Solving a Debate in Plasmonics
The findings also address a long-standing question of whether plasmonic structures can boost dark excitons without altering their fundamental nature when placed in close proximity. The researchers solved this by designing a plasmonic-excitonic heterostructure made with nanometer-thin boron nitride layers, which proved essential for revealing the newly identified dark excitons.
The work received support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation. More