Imagine a material so thin it's just a few atoms stacked together — thinner than any paper you've ever held. Now imagine that this tiny sheet can let light and magnetism talk to each other, working as a team instead of as strangers. That's exactly what researchers at the City College of New York have been studying, and they say it could change how we build computers and other devices in the future.
Vinod M. Menon leads a lab called LaNMP, short for Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics. His team has published a major review in the journal Nature Materials. The paper looks at special materials called van der Waals magnetic semiconductors — crystals where light and magnetism are deeply connected rather than separate.
So what does that mean in simple terms? When light hits these materials, it creates tiny particles called excitons. Think of an exciton like a跳跳球 — the light gives an electron a energy boost, sending it bouncing away from its home, but the electron and the empty space it left behind stay connected. Those excitons can then interact with magnons, which are like ripples traveling through a material's magnetic field.
In older materials, scientists had to tack magnetism onto semiconductors from the outside. But in these new van der Waals materials, excitons and magnetism grow from the same place. That shared origin lets them influence each other naturally.
"In these materials, light and magnetism no longer operate as separate channels," said Pratap Chandra Adak, a postdoctoral researcher in Menon's group and the lead author of the review. "An exciton is not just a passive light-driven excitation sitting on top of the magnetism. It can sense the spin order and magnons, and under the right conditions, even help control the magnetic state itself."
The team looked at specific materials including chromium triiodide, nickel phosphorus trisulfide, and chromium sulfur bromide. They found that excitons can make it easier to detect magnetic states by watching how light's polarization changes. Magnetic order can also shift the energy of excitons and control where they sit inside a material.
So what could this lead to? The researchers point to several possibilities: memory devices that store data using both light and magnetism, logic gates that work entirely with light, adjustable light-emitting devices, special lasers, and devices called quantum transducers. Those transducers could help connect different parts of future quantum computers by converting signals between radio waves and light.
Professor Menon said the goal is to bring together years of scattered discoveries into one clear picture and point toward what comes next. The work was supported by DARPA and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. While many questions remain unanswered, this research maps out a promising path for quantum technology — and it all starts with materials thinner than a strand of DNA.
Written by Meridia Staff
Note: This story was written based on a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Materials. Meridia covers scientific discoveries that give people reasons to feel hopeful about the future.