UW Physics Professor Receives Grant to Develop Next-Generation Quantum Materials

Smarter, faster and more efficient. These are the gold standards driving modern technological development.

Yu-Tsung “Rem” Tsai, an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming Department of Physics and Astronomy, is working on new materials that could raise the bar for quantum computing and sensing technologies with the assistance of a $993,674 U.S. Department of Energy EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant.

Tsai’s expertise lies in the creation of two-dimensional materials with great potential for applications in quantum computing and sensing.

“Everything in a crystal is vibrating and, in certain ultra-thin materials, those vibrations twist in a corkscrew pattern instead of simply rocking back and forth,” Tsai explains about these materials. “That twisting motion carries a form of rotation that can be handed off to electrons, which points toward a future generation of electronics that run on light and on the magnetic character of electrons rather than on electrical current alone.”

Technology of this nature, however, will need to operate at very cold temperatures under strong magnetic fields, and no one has yet documented how those twisting vibrations will behave under the required real-world conditions.

This is what Tsai is set to undertake in the EPSCoR-funded project titled “Investigating Axial Chiral Phonons for Opto-Spintronic Control in Quantum Materials.” The four-year project will operate in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory starting in 2027.

During the first stage of the project, Tsai’s team will grow layered sheets of tungsten-based material only a few atoms thick and conduct a first round of optical measurements in Wyoming.

The samples will then be shipped to Los Alamos, where project members Andrew Jones and Prashant Padmanabhan will submit the materials to imaging and ultrafast measurement. To do this, they will shine laser light on the material and “read” the light that comes back. The Los Alamos team also will map and probe the samples with microscopes capable of resolving features billionths of a meter across with lasers fast enough to catch a vibration in the act, on the scale of trillionths of a second.

The results of these analyses will be shared with Tsai’s team at UW to make improvements in subsequent batches to increase optimization of the new material.

“The work is exciting because it turns something usually treated as background noise -- the vibration of atoms -- into a control knob that light can turn,” Tsai says.

The grant includes funding for a UW postdoctoral researcher and a Ph.D. student, both of whom will spend three years at Los Alamos National Laboratory and one year at UW to galvanize efforts between the two locations. The grant also provides funding for a UW undergraduate student.

“For Wyoming, the project brings close to a million dollars of federal research funding into the state; trains three people at different career stages in skills that quantum and semiconductor employers are actively hiring for; and builds a durable working relationship between UW and a national laboratory,” Tsai says. “The longer-term payoff, if the science holds up, is computing and sensing hardware that does more while drawing far less power.”