New magnetic quasi-particle generated by coupling light to a pile of ultra-thin two-dimensional magnets comes from the Center for Discovery and Innovation and Department of Physics at City College, New York. This achievement stems from a collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, laying the foundation for an emerging strategy for artificially designed materials by ensuring strong interactions with light. This progress in
was published in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, titled "Spin-correlated excitons in van der Waals magnets".
“Implementing our approach with magnetic materials is a promising pathway to achieving effective magneto-optical effects,” said Vinod M. Menon, CCNY physicist who led the study. “Achieving this goal could enable them to be used in everyday device applications such as lasers, or for digital data storage.”
lead author of the study, Dr. Florian Deanberg, believes that their work reveals a largely unexplored area of the strong interaction between light and magnetic crystals. "Recent research has produced many atomic planar magnets that are very suitable for our method," he noted.
Looking to the future, the team plans to expand these studies to understand the role of quantum electric vacuum when placing quantum material into an optical cavity. “Our work paves the way for stabilizing new mass subphase without counterparts in thermodynamics equilibrium,” commented Edoardo Baldini, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
