In the air people breathe, the water on the Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the universe. Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is crucial for research with implications for astrophysics and in applications such as medical imaging and data storage.

A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long‑standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium‑50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.

“What current models propose is that magnetic strength is largely generated by spin-flip excitations, that means when flipping proton or neutron spins from up to down between so-called spin-orbit partner orbitals,” said Associate Professor Mark Spieker, a co-author on the multi-institution study. “For the first time, we showed that this type of spin-flip cannot be the only mechanism that generates nuclear magnetism.”

How it works

Current nuclear models treat protons and neutrons as individual particles that can occupy fixed energy levels. A spin-flip occurs when these particles change the orientation of their spin as they jump between levels, generating magnetic strength in the process. For many years, scientists believed that this spin-flip mechanism was mainly responsible for magnetic strengths, or signals, in atomic nuclei. Advanced computer modeling also predicted this behavior.

The FSU experiments showed something unexpected: nuclear excited states that clearly showed this neutron spin-flip structure were not the ones producing the strongest magnetic signals. In other words, having more of this neutron “spin‑flip” structure did not automatically mean a stronger magnetic effect.

What they did

The researchers conducted a neutron-transfer experiment at the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory, using the facility’s Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator to direct a deuteron — a nucleus made of a proton and a neutron — beam at a thin foil of titanium-49. During the reaction, the neutron from the beam was transferred to titanium-49, producing titanium-50 and leaving a residual proton.

Scientists used the Super-Enge Split-Pole Spectrograph at the Fox Lab to measure the different angles at which the proton was emitted in the reaction, allowing them to analyze how the neutron was transferred to titanium-49.

“You could say that the deuteron beam hits the titanium-49, transfers a neutron, and in this process kicks it up a set of stairs. Depending on the nucleus, that set of stairs looks very different,” Spieker said. “With the spectrograph, we can measure how high the different steps are. How high we get up the set of stairs depends on the excitation energy that we give to the nucleus.”

They combined their results with previously published electron- and proton-scattering data and with data from new photon-scattering experiments conducted at collaborating universities. By combining all these approaches, they were able to closely examine how neutrons flip their spin and how much those flips contribute to the nucleus’s overall magnetic behavior.

The researchers saw that the magnetic signal observed in their experiments was not of the same strength as models predicted — a sign that something else must be contributing to the magnetic signals they measured for titanium-50.

“Without combining all these data sets, the story cannot be stitched together cleanly,” said Bryan Kelly, a graduate student at FSU and study co-author. “Seeing the other magnetic excitations, that the other probes are sensitive to, allowed us to conclude that the spin-flip mechanism between spin-orbit partners is not the sole factor of magnetic strength generation.”

Why it matters and future directions

The study’s results challenge long-standing assumptions about the magnetic behavior of nuclei. Improving scientific understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei will refine current models used across nuclear physics and astrophysics and will help to link these with models used in high-energy physics. Such combined efforts between different fields of physics lead to a better understanding of the building blocks of ordinary matter that shape our universe.

“Developing a better understanding of the universe is exciting and fascinating on its own, and as we learn more, we can possibly apply these new insights to all sorts of new ideas,” Spieker said. “All ordinary matter is made of atomic nuclei, so the more we understand these ‘building blocks’ of nature, the more possibilities we have for what we can use them for to benefit society and drive progress.”

In future studies, the researchers plan to examine what accounts for the unexplained magnetism in titanium-50.

“This research showed that we cannot rely on magnetic strength measurements alone to understand excited states of nuclei,” Kelly said. “Magnetic strength is spread out across several nuclear states and understanding why will require further investigations of the nucleus.”

Acknowledgements

Researchers from Florida State University, the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory in North Carolina at Duke University contributed to this study.

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the German Research Foundation, the Institute of Atomic Physics in Romania, the Romanian Ministry of Research and the Romanian Government.

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A Florida State University particle physicist has been awarded a fellowship to support his research into the Higgs boson, a fundamental building block of our universe, and dark matter.

Kohsaku Tobioka, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, is the first FSU faculty member to receive an Invitational Fellowship for Research in Japan from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, or JSPS. The fellowship will support his research in Japan from April to July.

“We’re looking to learn more about the origins of the universe, and conducting research across institutions and nations is essential to do so,” Tobioka said. “We need international collaboration to make real progress; it can’t be done with just one laboratory or nation.”

JSPS strengthens international research networks and fosters the next generation of scientists who pursue the creation of new avenues of knowledge in all areas of science. The specific fellowship Tobioka earned invites physics researchers with exceptional records of achievement to collaborate with colleagues at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University in Japan, a world-renowned institute for theoretical physics research.

“In the four months of my fellowship, I hope to begin two projects and continue working with Kyoto University researchers after returning to FSU,” Tobioka said.

In collaboration with Ryuichiro Kitano, a professor at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Tobioka will focus on two research avenues: the presence of dark matter — an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up most of the mass in the observable universe — as well as properties of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that interacts with other particles, which receive their mass through interactions with the Higgs field.

For 60 years, the existence of the Higgs boson was considered the final missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory classifying all known elementary particles. In 2012, it was produced for the first time and confirmed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva. Several FSU researchers were among hundreds of scientists who served significant roles in search of the particle.

Tobioka’s work will investigate how the Higgs boson interacts with itself, helping scientists understand how the universe began.

The collaborative research will use a future muon collider to experiment with higher amounts of energy than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which facilitates research of subatomic particles by firing two high-speed protons at each other and observing what is produced in the collision.

In a 2024 publication, Tobioka and his former student, physics doctoral alumna Shemeran Mahmud, presented novel techniques to observe the Higgs boson self-interaction, and these new techniques can be achieved with a muon collider, which is much smaller than the LHC. Instead of firing protons, these colliders use muons — subatomic particles similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier, yielding a higher energy.

“Using protons, like in the LHC, requires a very big tunnel and can be an infrastructure challenge,” Tobioka said. “A muon collider is a smaller, completely new technology. We all want to know where we came from and how the universe came to be, and this essential science has the potential for unpredictable breakthroughs.”

Another direction of Tobioka’s research will focus on dark matter, which makes up about 27 percent of the known universe. While dark matter is invisible, scientists can understand it by observing the way it affects the environment around it through forces such as gravity. Tobioka plans to use superconducting qubits, which are cutting-edge quantum computing materials, to detect dark matter waves and develop theoretical foundations connecting dark matter and superconductivity.

“Some people call dark matter ‘the mother of galaxies’ because it hosts stars and galaxies,” Tobioka said. “Because our solar system is constantly moving through the galaxy’s dark matter, we may experience a ‘dark matter wind’ which lets us measure that dark matter. Discovering and fully understanding dark matter is a global competition right now.”

Tobioka earned his doctorate from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa campus in 2014 and received a Research Fellowship for Young Scientists from JSPS that same year. He completed postdoctoral research at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan and held a joint appointment with Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He conducted research at Stony Brook University in New York before joining FSU’s faculty in 2018.

In addition to his research, Tobioka also regularly participates in FSU’s Saturday Morning Physics program to promote scientific engagement and outreach for children and the broader community.

“Professor Tobioka has brought brilliance and energy to both our physics department and the department’s high-energy physics group,” said Paul Cottle, Department of Physics chair. “He’s an intellectual risk-taker who is constantly challenging boundaries.”

To learn more about Tobioka’s work and other research conducted in FSU’s Department of Physics, visit physics.fsu.edu.

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A Florida State University physicist has been awarded one of the most prestigious awards available to early career faculty for his work in condensed matter physics.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cyprian Lewandowski is a recipient of a 2026 Faculty Early Career Development Award, or CAREER Award, from the National Science Foundation for his research into emergent electronic phenomena — effects that manifest in condensed matter systems when interactions occur among particles — such as new superconducting or insulating states in quantum materials.

The CAREER Awards Program offers NSF’s most significant awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as role models in research and education and to lead groundbreaking advances in their fields. The award provides faculty with five full years of funding to support students and conduct research while granting them an opportunity to work closely with NSF staff on developing their professional endeavors.

“While this award lists my name, it really belongs to all the people who contributed to and helped me throughout my journey,” Lewandowski said. “I still can’t believe I’ve earned it. It’s significant validation that what I’m doing is indeed of interest to a broad audience of scientists.”

After earning his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020, Lewandowski spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Since joining FSU’s faculty in 2024, he’s taught classes ranging from beginner physics for non-majors to advanced graduate-level quantum many-body physics courses.

In his research, Lewandowski analyzes moiré materials, which are quantum materials that look like tiny, patterned quilts at the atomic level due to their unique crystalline structure. They’re composed of two or more atomically thin sheets of elements that create a repeating — moiré — pattern when slightly offset at a particular angle or when the two materials slightly differ in their crystalline structure.

This moiré structure creates special conditions in which electrons move slowly and interact strongly — yielding specific physical conditions known as the flat-band regime — and leads to surprising physical phenomena, such as novel types of superconducting states or unexpected optical effects. These unexpected phenomena have the potential to enable transformative technologies, such as new quantum computing platforms or more advanced sensors.

“I want to uncover what other effects these materials can exhibit by focusing on additional properties of these systems aside from the propensity for electrons to interact strongly with one another,” Lewandowski said. “This multi-part project looks beyond the flat-band aspect of these systems to examine other unique features of these quantum materials, such as their multilayer structure or the impact of the moiré structural patterns, which I aim to investigate with funds from the CAREER Award. The broad goal is to discover how these additional features can unlock new physics and functionalities that can lead to novel quantum and technological advances.”

The first branch of Lewandowski’s project involves studying plasmons — collective electron oscillations that can carry energy at ultrafast speeds — to open pathways for next-generation terahertz electronics and communication methods. A second component focuses on light-matter interactions and developing new design principles for improved solar-cell technologies. The project’s third part investigates the origins of superconductivity in multilayer moiré systems, an open question in the field.

“While my focus is on moiré materials, my ultimate goal is to uncover fundamental design principles and ideas that I can implement in other quantum materials that might be more industrially viable and can be manufactured on a large scale,” Lewandowski said. “My goal isn’t to solve every problem using moiré materials, but I want to develop potentially transformative ideas based on the moiré materials that can be leveraged in technological applications.”

Lewandowski, who is also affiliated with the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the FSU Initiative in Quantum Science and Engineering, is an American Physical Society Career Mentoring Fellow and serves as the adviser for the Society of Physics Students at FSU. Currently, he advises two doctoral students and two postdoctoral scholars.

Alongside research activity, the CAREER Award will support an educational component designed to improve visibility, accessibility and participation in condensed-matter physics through the development of a series of at-home, do-it-yourself experiments emphasizing condensed-matter principles as well as a series of National MagLab events to stimulate undergraduate interest in condensed-matter research.

The education plan also includes a component dedicated to addressing stuttering in academia featuring videos and resources that include examples of role models in academia who stutter and techniques for managing stuttering.

“Cyprian is a brilliant physicist and a remarkable educator who opens his heart to his students, and students respond to this,” said Department of Physics chair Paul Cottle. “He led the FSU chapter of the Society of Physics Students, an organization for undergraduate physics majors, to some terrific accomplishments, including winning the Outstanding Chapter Award from the national SPS organization for the third year in a row.”

To learn more about research conducted in the Department of Physics, visit physics.fsu.edu. For information about the FSU Initiative in Quantum Science and Engineering, go to quantum.fsu.edu.

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Electricity powers our lives, including our cars, phones, computers and more, through the movement of electrons within a circuit. While we can’t see these electrons, electric currents moving through a conductor flow like water through a pipe to produce electricity.

Certain materials, however, allow that electron flow to “freeze” into crystallized shapes, triggering a transition in the state of matter that the electrons collectively form. This turns the material from a conductor to an insulator, stopping the flow of electrons and providing a unique window into their complex behavior. This phenomenon makes possible new technologies in quantum computing, advanced superconductivity for energy and medical imaging, lighting, and highly precise atomic clocks. 

A team of Florida State University-based physicists, including National High Magnetic Field Laboratory Dirac Postdoctoral Fellow Aman Kumar, Associate Professor Hitesh Changlani and Assistant Professor Cyprian Lewandowski, have shown the conditions necessary to stabilize a phase of matter in which electrons exist in a solid crystalline lattice but can “melt” into a liquid state, known as a generalized Wigner crystal. Their work was published in npj Quantum Materials, a Nature publication. 

HOW IT WORKS
At certain densities, electrons in two-dimensional systems are expected to form Wigner crystals, which were first theorized in 1934. These crystals have been identified in several recent experiments, but it wasn’t clear how these unique states come about when accounting for additional quantum mechanical effects. 

“In our study, we determined which ‘quantum knobs’ to turn to trigger this phase transition and achieve a generalized Wigner crystal, which uses a 2D moiré system and allows different crystalline shapes to form, like stripes or honeycomb crystals, unlike traditional Wigner crystals that only show a triangular lattice crystal,” Changlani said. 

The researchers used FSU’s Research Computing Center, an academic service unit of Information Technology Services, and the National Science Foundation’s ACCESS, an advanced computing and data resource program under the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, to conduct calculations and run large-scale simulations using numerical techniques like exact diagonalization, density matrix renormalization group and Monte Carlo simulations. 

In quantum mechanics, there are two pieces of quantum information for every electron. When dealing with hundreds and thousands of electrons, the amount of information becomes overwhelming. The algorithms and numerical techniques used by the team actively simplify this vast amount of information into digestible networks, allowing researchers to draw insights from it. 

“We’re able to mimic experimental findings via our theoretical understanding of the state of matter,” Kumar said. “We conduct precise theoretical calculations using state-of-the-art tensor network calculations and exact diagonalization, a powerful numerical technique used in physics to collect details about a quantum Hamiltonian, which represents the total quantum energy in a system. Through this, we can provide a picture for how the crystal states came about and why they’re favored in comparison to other energetically competitive states.” 

QUANTUM PINBALLS
The team also discovered a new state of matter in which conducting and insulating properties coexist due to unusual electron behaviors. They found that the generalized Wigner crystal can partially “melt” — while some electrons remained frozen, other electrons delocalized and began moving around the system, similar to a ball zooming around fixed pins in a pinball machine. 

“This pinball phase is a very exciting phase of matter that we observed while researching the generalized Wigner crystal,” Lewandowski said. “Some electrons want to freeze and others want to float around, which means that some are insulating and some are conducting electricity. This is the first time this unique quantum mechanical effect has been observed and reported for the electron density we studied in our work.” 

WHY IT MATTERS
The research gives scientists a greater understanding of how to manipulate states of matter. 

“What causes something to be insulating, conducting or magnetic? Can we transmute something into a different state?” Lewandowski said. “We’re looking to predict where certain phases of matter exist and how one state can transition to another — when you think of turning a liquid into gas, you picture turning up a heat knob to get water to boil into steam. Here, it turns out there are other quantum knobs we can play with to manipulate states of matter, which can lead to impressive advances in experimental research.” 

Tuning these knobs, or energy scales, can drive phase transitions in electrons from solid to liquid. Studying Wigner crystals offers unique insights into quantum phases of matter and has potential applications in powerful quantum computing and in spintronics — a revolutionary new field in condensed-matter physics that can increase the memory and logic processing capability of nano-electronic devices while reducing power consumption and production costs. 

The research team hopes to better understand the cooperative behavior of electrons and address theoretical questions that can lead to breakthrough applications in quantum, superconducting and atomic technologies. 

To learn more about research conducted in FSU’s Department of Physics, visit physics.fsu.edu. For more on the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field laboratory, visit nationalmaglab.org.

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In physics, students learn about electrons, neutrons and protons. Then they dig a little deeper and learn about quarks and finally, they get to the mysterious subatomic particle known as the neutrino or ghost particle.

These fascinating particles have no charge, very little mass and have been stumping physicists who are eager to understand how this fundamental building block of the universe operates.

Now, rival groups — one conducting experiments in the U.S. and the other in Japan — have joined forces to offer the first major joint analysis in Nature, which provides some of the most precise neutrino-oscillation measurements in the field.

“This was an incredible collaboration with hundreds of scientists with different, but complementary approaches trying to tackle this question of how neutrinos operate,” said Mayly Sanchez, the Wyatt-Green Chair of Physics at Florida State University, who served as one of four liaisons to help coordinate the work between the two groups. “It’s been very rewarding work. I hope this serves as a seed for stronger international collaboration and sparks a new wave of discoveries about these mysterious particles.”

The analysis didn’t definitively solve the fundamental mysteries about how these ghost particles work, but they add to physicists’ knowledge and offer possible pathways forward to understanding the mass composition of neutrinos and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

As a major question mark in the world of science, neutrinos naturally attract attention from the worldwide scientific community.

The new analysis combined 10 years of data from the T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) collaboration, headquartered in Japan, as well as six years of data from NOvA, the NuMI Off-axis νe Appearance experiment. The joint operation represents the work of 810 scientists and engineers from 124 institutions and 23 countries.

In the T2K experiment, scientists shoot a neutrino beam 295 kilometers from in Japan. In the NOvA experiment, a neutrino beam travels from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago to a 14,000-ton liquid-scintillator detector in Ash River, Minnesota.

At both locations, scientists and engineers measure the types — or flavors — of neutrinos that are initially shot out at the source of the experiment and then measure what flavors arrive at the detectors.

Scientists were particularly interested in learning more about something called neutrino oscillation. Through this phenomenon, neutrinos change types, referred to as flavors, as they travel long distances. By comparing how neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate, scientists hope to learn whether they obey the same laws or show subtle differences. Such differences could hold the key to understanding why matter prevailed over antimatter after the Big Bang.

There are three different types or flavors of neutrinos – electron, muon and tau. There are also three different mass states. But confusingly, the types of mass states do not map to the three different types of neutrinos. Rather, each flavor is made of a mix of the three mass states.

The analysis showed there are two possible ways that the masses could be arranged— one that is considered normal and one that is considered inverted. Under normal ordering, two of the mass states are relatively light and one is heavy, while the inverted ordering has two heavier mass states and one light.

The combined analysis from the two collaborations does not favor either mass ordering, nor does it show a clear difference between how neutrinos and antineutrinos behave — a potential sign that the universe is made mostly of matter.

Sanchez said that physicists from NOvA and T2K are already preparing for new experiments so they can collect additional data that will hopefully shed more light on these puzzling particles.

“Neutrinos work in mysterious ways, and the results of our experiments don’t quite align,” Sanchez said. “The result of this paper is there are these two possible universes — inverted or normal — and I’m looking forward to the next generation of experiments to see which one we are living in. Equally exciting is the possibility that neutrinos and antineutrinos may not behave in exactly the same way, which could help us understand why the universe today is made of matter rather than equal parts matter and antimatter.”

###

This release was adapted from information provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

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The Florida State University Department of Physics is inviting the community into the classroom this fall to explore the science behind stars, rockets and the universe through the annual Saturday Morning Physics program. 

“Saturday Morning Physics is a free-of-charge event series in which physicists present fun and interesting topics in easy-to-understand, non-technical terms,” said Kevin Fossez, assistant professor of physics and Saturday Morning Physics committee chair. “Our format is designed to engage kids with hands-on activities. Expect to take pictures!” 

Since 1983, the program has welcomed hundreds of K-12 students and community members to learn about basic physics concepts from FSU faculty — both educating and inspiring attendees.

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Scientists around the world are marking 2025 as the “Year of Quantum,” recognizing a century since the birth of modern quantum mechanics and the potential for quantum science and engineering to yield breakthroughs in high-performance computing, communication technology, cybersecurity, medical imaging, environmental sensing and more. 

The Quantum Initiative at Florida State University aims to further quantum science and engineering (QSE) and to realize its potential for transforming technology and our understanding of how to apply these new technologies to improve our world.  

FSU has made major investments in expanding its existing research in this rapidly growing field. At the university’s 2023 quantum symposium, FSU President Richard McCullough announced an initial investment of more than $20 million into the initiative. Two years later, the university has hired seven new faculty members and 11 postdoctoral fellows and has opened a new $126 million cutting-edge laboratory space where faculty and researchers can develop the next generation of quantum science and engineering. 

“Florida State University is a national leader in quantum research,” McCullough said. “Quantum science and engineering will change the world and transform lives and FSU plans to lead the way.” 

NEW FACULTY AND FACILITIES
People are the centerpiece of the university’s efforts in quantum science and engineering. The university is investing in existing faculty and adding new researchers to support groundbreaking QSE research. Investment by FSU leadership has allowed the university to attract some of the best young talent in this field. 

“We are deeply committed to becoming a global leader in key research areas, building on the exceptional foundation laid by our outstanding faculty,” said Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. 

Along with new hires, support from the Florida Legislature has allowed FSU to develop the facilities that will enable scientists to break new ground in quantum research. 

The Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building (IRCB) will be a hub for researchers from a variety of disciplines and serve as the headquarters for FSU Quantum. With state-of-the-art equipment and remarkable faculty talent, FSU leadership envisions the IRCB as a regional focal point for quantum science and engineering, drawing researchers from around the Southeast who may use the equipment for their own projects.

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With recent hires in the College of Medicine and the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy, Florida State University has doubled the number of its faculty who are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a prestigious organization that unites leading researchers from around the country.

“Florida State University is a leading research university and an excellent place to grow an academic career,” said FSU President Richard McCullough. “Our ability to attract these esteemed faculty members is a testament to that commitment.”

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM, are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and world. Their work helps shape sound policies, inform public opinion and advance the pursuit of science, engineering and medicine.

The university now counts 12 NASEM members among its faculty, an increase from six in 2024.

“These National Academy members want to be a part of FSU because the administration, faculty and students value their contributions and the opportunity to collaborate,” said Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Jim Clark.

This year, FSU added National Academy members A. Stewart Fotheringham to the Department of Geography, Regan Bailey to the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, and Patrick Stover to the Department of Biomedical Sciences.

Fotheringham is the Krafft Professor of Spatial Data Science and the director of the Spatial Data Science Center. His research focuses on the analysis of spatial data sets using statistical, mathematical and computational methods, which he applies to topics such as health data, crime patterns, migration and more.

Bailey is a professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine and co-director of the Institute for Connecting Nutrition and Health. She is a nutritional epidemiologist whose research is focused on promoting health through nutrition across the lifespan. Her research program uses best practices for characterizing nutritional status, improvement of dietary assessment and chronic disease risk using a life course approach.

Stover is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Connecting Nutrition and Health. He is known for his research on folate metabolism and its crucial role in human health. His work has helped uncover how folate, a B-vitamin, affects critical biological processes such as DNA synthesis, repair and methylation, and it has shown how folate deficiencies could lead to severe health consequences such as neuropathies, cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

The number of National Academy members on the faculty is an important factor for institutional membership in the Association of American Universities, or AAU, a group of leading research universities.

National Academy members at FSU are working on game-changing research across campus:

National Academy of Sciences
Greg Boebinger, Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences; director emeritus of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Laura Greene, Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences; chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Steven Stanley, Department of Biological Science, College of Arts and Sciences
A. Stewart Fotheringham, Department of Geography, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy
Patrick Stover, Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Medicine

National Academy of Medicine
Regan Bailey, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, College of Medicine
Barbara J. Culliton, College of Communication and Information
Susan B. Hassmiller, College of Nursing
Jill Quadagno, Department of Sociology, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy

National Academy of Engineering
David C. Larbalestier, Department of Mechanical Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering; chief materials scientist, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Manoj Shah, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Longya Xu, Office of the Dean, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering

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Florida State University Assistant Professor of Physics Zhengguang Lu and fellow researchers have discovered new states of matter in graphene — a form of carbon made from a single layer of atoms — with unusual electrical properties that could make them a valuable tool for building more powerful electronics and quantum computers.

In a study published in Nature, the researchers detailed how they designed structures made from five layers of graphene sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride and found that they exhibited unique electronic behavior at very low temperatures. In this configuration, electrons travel along the edges of the structure as fractions of a single charge without energy loss, a phenomenon protected by topology, meaning those properties are unchanged during bending, stretching or other deformations of the system.

“This is one of the special parts about physics — a tiny difference in a material’s structure can create a system that behaves completely differently,” said Lu, an FSU alumnus who was also a postdoctoral researcher on the team that first discovered this phenomenon in graphite systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in late 2023.

The states of matter discovered by Lu and colleagues exhibit what are called quantum anomalous Hall states, meaning electric current can flow along the edges of the material with zero resistance and without needing a magnetic field.

More specifically, researchers found both an electron crystal state showing integer quantum anomalous Hall states, in which electrical conductance values are restricted to whole numbers, as well as fractional quantum anomalous Hall states, meaning they measured electrical conductance that reached fractional values instead of only integers. This finding is a sign of strongly correlated electron behavior.

“If the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect is combined with a superconductor, the resulting quantum computer will be more efficient than current quantum computers and free of error. Even a weak magnetic field will eventually kill a superconductor, which is why uncovering these states at zero magnetic field is so important,” Lu said.

To investigate the graphene layers, the research team froze samples to below 40 millikelvin, or around -460 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the electrons arranged themselves into two new phases: fractional quantum anomalous Hall states at 5/9 and 5/11, in which electrons carried five-ninths and five-elevenths of a single charge, and an electron crystal state showing the integer quantum anomalous Hall effect in a wide range of electron density.

“Think of the fractional states as liquid, like flowing water, while the electron crystal state — what we call the extended quantum anomalous Hall state — resembles electron ice,” Lu said. “These liquid and solid phases exist similarly to a river flowing through glaciers. Remarkably, these two different electron phases can coexist in the system at ultra-low temperatures.”

Another key factor in these discoveries is the moiré pattern, a pattern that forms when the five-layer graphene interacts with nearby boron nitride. Moiré refers to the repeating spatial pattern created when overlaying sheets of atoms are slightly offset at a particular angle or are different sizes.

“The moiré potential is like a scissor that helps us cut out the most useful parts of a quantum material,” said Lu. “By engineering two-dimensional materials in this ‘twistronics’ fashion, we are unlocking new possibilities in quantum physics.”

For over two decades, graphene has been a key material in studying novel electron behaviors, but discovering new fractional states emphasizes how much remains unknown about even the simplest materials. This work highlights how rich quantum materials can be. Even something as common as pencil graphite can exhibit groundbreaking quantum properties.

“The kinds of multilayer graphene in which Zhengguang found the new quantum states are all present in natural graphite but were considered extremely difficult to identify and isolate,” said Peng Xiong, professor of physics and an expert in the field of mesoscopic electronic phenomena in quantum materials. “His ingenuity overcame this insurmountable obstacle and led to these breakthroughs — these fractional states are considered the holy grail of quantum computing.”

The multilayer rhombus-shaped graphene and hexagonal boron nitride system has become a highly versatile platform for exploring quantum phenomena, paving the way for future advances in quantum computing and materials science.

The particles that could make the bits needed for quantum computers possible are extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances, such as magnetic fields or temperature changes. Alternative methods, such as work developed by Lu and team, offer new possibilities for this emerging technology.

“Zhengguang brings FSU to the very forefront of one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today,” Xiong said. “In my view, he has been able to achieve all the successes he’s enjoyed in quantum materials research because he not only has a brilliant physics mind but is also able to make the impossible happen in the lab.”

Additional contributors to this research include scientists at MIT and researchers from the Research Center for Electronic and Optical Materials, part of the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan.

To learn more about research conducted in the Department of Physics, visit physics.fsu.edu.

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Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess will share the latest research into the expanding universe in his public lecture, “The Surprising Expansion History of the Universe,” part of this year’s Dirac Lectures presented by the Florida State University Department of Physics.

Riess, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, will explain how his team discovered the acceleration of the universe and why understanding the nature of so-called “dark energy” presents one of the greatest remaining challenges in astrophysics.

The Dirac Lectures celebrate the memory of Paul Dirac, a late FSU Physics faculty member, Nobel Laureate, and the namesake of the Dirac Science Library. These lectures bring outstanding speakers to FSU to present notable physics topics, both for a professional physics audience and for the general public.

Riess’ public lecture will take place:

THURSDAY, APRIL 17

7 P.M.

AUDITORIUM OF THE FSU EARTH, OCEAN AND ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE BUILDING

1011 ACADEMIC WAY

TALLAHASSEE, FLA.

“We are honored to welcome Professor Riess to Florida State for this exciting talk,” said Jorge Piekarewicz, a professor in the Department of Physics and Dirac Lectures organizer. “His discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate is a profound contribution to our understanding of astrophysics.”

Riess’ research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). Currently, he leads the SH0ES (Supernova, H0, for the Equation of State of Dark Energy) research team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant, and the Higher-z Team, which seeks to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae in order to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.

Along with Riess, the FSU Department of Physics will host guest lecturers David Schlegel, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Licia Verde, professor at the University of Barcelona. Verde will present her lecture, “ΛCDM Status,” and Schlegel will present “3-D Cosmic Maps from DESI and Future Redshift Surveys.” Their latest results were recently featured in The New York Times. Riess will also present two lectures for professional physics audiences, “Dark Energy,” and “Hubble Constant Tension.”

The FSU Department of Physics first organized the Dirac Lectures in 2007. Guest lecturers have presented talks on neutrinos in nuclear physics, gravitational waves, quantum information science and other topics.

For more information and lecture details, visit the Dirac Lecture webpage.

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