Penn Researchers Finding Ways to Control Electrical Properties in Quantum Materials

(Phys.org) researchers are still looking for new and better ways to control the uniquely powerful electronic properties of quantum materials.
A new study from Penn researchers found that Weyl semimetals, a class of quantum materials, have bulk quantum states whose electrical properties can be controlled using light. Project leader Ritesh Agarwal explained the value, “With quantum computing, all platforms are light-based, so it’s the photon which is the carrier of quantum information. If we can configure our detectors on a chip, everything can be integrated, and we can read out the state of the photon directly,” Agarwal says.
Future development of “photonic” and “spintronic” materials that transfer digitized information based on the spin of photons or electrons respectively is also made possible thanks to these results. Agarwal hopes to expand this work to include other optical beam patterns, such as “twisted light,” which could be used to create new quantum computing materials that allow more information to be encoded onto a single photon of light.