Study Unveils New
Half-Light
Half-Matter Quantum Particles
December 29, 2014 | City College
Half-Matter Quantum Particles
December 29, 2014 | City College
Prospects of developing computing
and communication technologies based on quantum properties of light and matter
may have taken a major step forward thanks to research by City College of New
York physicists led by Dr. Vinod Menon.
In a pioneering
study, Professor Menon and his team were able to discover half-light,
half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors (thickness ~ a
millionth of a single sheet of paper) consisting of two-dimensional (2D) layer
of molybdenum and sulfur atoms arranged similar to graphene. They sandwiched
this 2D material in a light trapping structure to realize these composite
quantum particles.
“Besides being a
fundamental breakthrough, this opens up the possibility of making devices which
take the benefits of both light and matter,” said Professor Menon.
For example one can
start envisioning logic gates and signal processors that take on best of light
and matter. The discovery is also expected to contribute to developing
practical platforms for quantum computing.
Dr. Dirk Englund, a
professor at MIT whose research focuses on quantum technologies based on
semiconductor and optical systems, hailed the City College
“What is so
remarkable and exciting in the work by Vinod and his team is how readily this
strong coupling regime could actually be achieved. They have shown convincingly
that by coupling a rather standard dielectric cavity to exciton–polaritons in a
monolayer of molybdenum disulphide, they could actually reach this strong
coupling regime with a very large binding strength,” he said.
Professor Menon’s
research team included City College PhD students, Xiaoze Liu, Tal Galfsky and
Zheng Sun, and scientists from Yale University , National
Tsing Hua
University (Taiwan )
and Ecole Polytechnic -Montreal (Canada
The study appears in
the January issue of the journal “Nature Photonics.”
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