From the Center for Discovery and Innovation at the City College of New York and the Department of Physics comes news of a new type of magnetic quasiparticle created by coupling light to a stack of ultra-thin two-dimensional magnets. This achievement from a collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin lays the foundation for an emerging strategy to design things in style by ensuring their strong relationship with light.
“The implementation of our method in magnetic materials is a promising way to achieve effective magneto-optical effects,” CCNY scientist Vinod M.. Menon, his colleague conducted the study. “Achieving this goal could enable them to use everyday tools and devices such as lasers, or for digital data storage.”
Dr. Florian Dirnberger, the leader of the study, believes that their work has revealed an undeveloped area of the strong relationship between light and magnetic crystals. “Research over the past few years has identified many flat magnets that are well suited to study with our approach,” he said.
In the future, the team plans to extend these investigations to understand the role of vacuum quantum electrodynamics when quantum objects are placed in optical space. “Our work opens the way to the stabilization of new quantum phases of matter that have no equivalent in thermodynamic equilibrium,” commented Edoardo Baldini, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
The development is reported in the current issue of “Nature Nanotechnology”, in an article entitled “Spin-correlated exciton-polaritons in a van der Waals magnet”.
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index.
