Six early-career faculty members at Florida State University have earned the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award, one of the federal agency’s most competitive honors.

“These prestigious awards underscore the National Science Foundation’s confidence in the extraordinary promise of our faculty and their capacity to advance discovery on a national scale,” said Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. “Across a range of fields, their work reflects the depth of talent, ambition and innovation that define Florida State University’s research enterprise.”

The Faculty Early Career Development Program, known as CAREER, supports early-career faculty who serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The award recognizes researchers who are building a strong foundation for lifelong leadership in integrating education and research.

Each CAREER award provides five years of grant funding to support faculty members’ research while expanding educational opportunities and research mentoring for graduate and undergraduate students.

The six faculty members are from the departments of Computer Science, Biological Science and Physics, all part of the College of Arts and Sciences. Sam Huckaba, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the college continues to cultivate a robust research culture by attracting top talent across disciplines.

“The College of Arts and Sciences has intentionally recruited outstanding early-career faculty, and seeing six of our scholars recognized with CAREER awards affirms the strength of that approach,” Huckuba said. “We are immensely proud of these faculty members and congratulate them on this accomplishment.”

Recognized Faculty Members

The Florida State University assistant professors recognized with NSF CAREER Awards are:

• Michael Gubanov — Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
• Cyprian Lewandowski — Assistant Professor, Department of Physics
• Douglas Storace — Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Science
• Amy Webster — Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Science
• Xiaonan Zhang — Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
• Kai Zhao — Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

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Florida State University will lead four major projects as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highly coveted Genesis Mission, showcasing the university’s strengths in advanced technological innovation.

These landmark projects, led by FSU’s world-class faculty, utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle some of the nation’s most complex challenges, spanning high-temperature superconductors for fusion energy, quantum error correction, particle physics, and nuclear reaction modeling.

“These awards further affirm Florida State University’s emergence as a national leader at the frontiers of discovery, innovation and national service,” said FSU President Richard McCullough. “To secure four projects through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission is a defining achievement for our institution and a powerful recognition of the caliber of our faculty. FSU is helping shape the scientific agenda for the nation’s future by advancing the artificial intelligence, quantum and energy frameworks that will strengthen our national infrastructure, accelerate American innovation and reinforce U.S. technological leadership.”

The Genesis Mission represents a major federal investment to unite DOE national labs, industry and academia to accelerate breakthroughs in energy dominance, physical sciences and national security. It has drawn comparisons to the Manhattan Project or Apollo mission. The Department of Energy awarded 278 awards across 26 identified science and technology challenges to accelerate U.S. innovation and scientific leadership during a summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, July 22.

FSU secured four awards and the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is partnering on a fifth award led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Three of the FSU awards stem from the Department of Physics, and the other is from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering.

The awards are for an initial phase one that is nine months. However, researchers who received the awards are invited to show initial results of their work and apply for a second phase of funding that will likely be announced next year.

FSU Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson emphasized the strategic alignment of these projects with FSU’s mission to deliver solutions to critical global challenges.

“FSU has strategically positioned itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and physical sciences to address some of the most critical vulnerabilities our country faces,” Patterson said. “From rebuilding a secure domestic supply chain for high-performance fusion magnets to paving the way for unbreakable, fault-tolerant quantum computers, these projects are highly practical solutions to real-world national security challenges. We are incredibly proud of our faculty for securing these historic awards, which will inspire next-generation breakthroughs and solidify FSU’s role as a trusted partner in federal scientific leadership.”

FSU researchers are leading the following Genesis projects:

AI-Powered Manufacturing of High Temperature Superconductors for Fusion Energy

Challenge Area: Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity

Led by Associate Professor Fumitake Kametani, this project uses AI to transform how high temperature superconducting tapes are made for fusion energy magnets. Manufacturing these highly engineered tapes involves subtle, hard-to-detect variations that limit performance uniformity and thus drive up costs of magnets, so the team is building an AI “digital twin”, which is a predictive computer model of the production line. This model learns how manufacturing conditions shape tape quality, helping rebuild a US-owned supply chain of this critically important technology for US energy security. FSU leads the project with the US manufacturer High Temperature Superconductors, Inc., and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sanghyun Lee, associate professor of Mathematics, and National High Magnetic Field Laboratory researchers Aixia Xu, Yan Xin, Jeseok Bang, and Chris Segal, will also play key roles in executing the project, as well as MagLab Chief Materials Scientist David Larbalestier.

Teaching AI to Fix Quantum Errors

Challenge Area: Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery

Led by Professor of Physics Nicholas Bonesteel, this project develops AI that acts as a real-time diagnostic system for quantum computers. Quantum computers are extraordinarily sensitive to noise, and keeping a quantum computation on track requires rapidly interpreting streams of indirect error signals. For today’s leading quantum codes, efficient classical algorithms handle this task — but they break down for the richer, more powerful codes expected to follow. The team is training neural networks to decode these signals for this next generation of quantum codes — essential groundwork for quantum computers that work at full scale. Co-Principal Investigators on this award include Assistant Professor of Physics Yanzhu Chen, Professor of Computer Science Xiuwen Liu, and FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Professor William Oates.

Accelerating Cosmic Discovery in Particle Physics

Challenge Area: Unifying Physics from Quarks to Cosmos

Led by Wyatt-Green Chair of Physics Mayly Sanchez and Robert O. Lawton Professor of Physics Harrison B. Prosper, this project uses AI to help scientists figure out one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: why everything around us is made of matter instead of antimatter. A massive U.S. experiment called DUNE will shoot invisible particles called neutrinos 800 miles through the Earth to find out, but physicists can only interpret what they see by comparing it against computer simulations that aren’t yet accurate enough. Today, improving those simulations is slow, hand-guided work that can take years. The FSU team is training an AI on millions of recorded neutrino collisions to find every place the simulation disagrees with reality at once, then compress what it learned into compact equations physicists can read. The team will transfer what the AI learns from one experiment directly to DUNE, opening the way to a system that unites the world’s neutrino data into a single shared model of how neutrinos interact with matter.

AI and Quantum Computing for the Next Generation of Nuclear Science

Challenge Area: Delivery of Fusion Energy

A multi-institutional team led by FSU will combine artificial intelligence with next-generation quantum-computing methods to improve understanding of atomic nuclei and other quantum systems. By combining AI-driven data analysis with advanced quantum-information methods, the researchers will address longstanding challenges in interpreting the vast amounts of experimental nuclear data collected over decades. Their work aims to produce predictive models that reveal how quantum systems interact, evolve, decay, and respond to external influences. Beyond advancing fundamental science, these developments could contribute to progress in quantum technologies, clean energy, and national security. The project brings together principal investigator Alexander Volya, Hitesh Changlani, and Yanzhu Chen of FSU; co-principal investigator Grigory Rogachev of Texas A&M University; Richard J. deBoer of the University of Notre Dame; collaborators at Quantinuum; and participating students and researchers across the institutions.

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Florida State University physicists are part of a team that has discovered unusual superconducting states in parts of graphene, with the potential to drive unexpected quantum technologies.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cyprian Lewandowski and postdoctoral researcher Phong Võ Tiến are part of an international collaboration that has uncovered new aspects of superconductivity and topology in rhombohedral graphene, a system comprising just a few layers of carbon atoms stacked like the treads of a staircase shape known as chiral stacking. The work was published in Nature Physics.

“The rhombohedral graphene system seems to capture many of the intriguing electronic phenomena that scientists have seen previously in other atomically thin systems, but they were previously not as ideal for technical applications due to the intrinsic complexity of the devices or replicability issues,” Lewandowski said. “In physics, once we identify a generic phenomenon, we try to distill it to its essential form to understand the underlying mechanism. This rhombohedral system allows us to do that. We’ve identified the natural occurrence of this effect and can build upon and optimize it to achieve properties only before seen in more complicated systems.”

Atomically thin flakes of rhombohedral graphene can be isolated from naturally occurring graphite crystals. In this structure, at a low energy, electrons are localized almost exclusively onto specific atoms on the top and bottom surfaces. By contrast, very little charge resides in the bulk of the material.

Congregating a large density of electrons onto the outer surfaces leads to interesting emergent quantum properties, as charges are forced to collectively “make choices” about how they reside on the surfaces while simultaneously repelling each other. The team found that superconductivity emerges directly from this dual-surface configuration, where electron and hole carriers on opposite surfaces conspire to form a superconducting state.

Collaborating on impactful science

FSU was joined in the collaboration by experimentalist teams led by co-principal investigators Matthew Yankowitz, associate professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Joshua Folk, professor of physics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Together, the team combined material and structure assembly expertise required to build highly sensitive and optimized electronic devices, measurement expertise to probe ultra-sensitive superconducting states that emerged from them, and theoretical expertise to turn experimental data into a coherent understanding of superconductivity in this novel platform.

“An added complexity of this system is that negative and positive charges coexist,” Yankowitz said.  “On one surface, the charges are electrons and therefore negatively charged. On the other surface, they behave like particles called holes, which are effectively positive. This work is advancing our fundamental understanding of the interplay of strongly correlated and topological phases, which could be an avenue toward the development of future quantum technologies.”

In addition to superconductivity, the team observed a quantum anomalous Hall effect — a topological state in which an electrical current flows without resistance along the edges of the material.

“Cyprian is applying his brilliant theoretical insights to cutting-edge problems in the science of quantum materials,” said Mike Shatruk, director of the FSU Initiative in Quantum Science and Engineering. “If the two phenomena of superconducting behavior and topological states can eventually be made to co-exist, theory predicts appearance of so-called Majorana zero modes, which are candidate building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computing; they’re inherently protected from local noise and decoherence that destroy quantum information.”

Next-generation quantum devices

One of the team’s guiding goals is to eventually translate the research into the realm of quantum engineering for the development of next-generation devices and detectors. Another significant aspect of the system is that there are two electronic layers of charges separated vertically, a geometry that previously had to be manually constructed. Discovering such material states that occur naturally can lead to exciting new avenues in fundamental physics and potential technological applications.

“In the 20th century, scientists gained a lot of our modern understanding of condensed-matter physics and phase transitions by working with helium, and I would argue that rhombohedral graphene may be serving the same purpose here in teaching us about unique crystalline phases of matter,” said Lewandowski, who utilizes the FSU Research Computing Center and the National Science Foundation-funded, FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in his work.

This research was supported by funding from the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, NSF and FSU. Other contributors include scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

Visit the FSU Department of Physics website to learn more about Lewandowski’s work and research. For more details on quantum science and engineering at FSU, visit the FSU Quantum Initiative website.

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Florida State University’s Art in STEM event returns for its 12th annual exhibition showcasing the artwork of FSU students conducting research in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines.

The FSU community is invited to enjoy an opening reception from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 21, at the Dirac Science Library, and vote in person or online for their favorite piece. The people’s choice award winner will be announced the following day.

This year’s edition of the annual exhibition, which can be viewed at the Dirac Library and accessed online in a digital gallery, is a collaboration among FSU’s Graduate Women in STEM (GWIS) organization, Art in the Library, and the FSU College of Arts and Sciences. It features 30 artworks created by students representing environmental science, geology, microscopic biology, neuroscience, physical chemistry, astrophysics, ecology, chemical engineering and more.

“The Art in STEM exhibition shows another side of students whose interests or majors are in STEM fields,” said Kaylie Green, 2025-2026 GWIS president and third-year biomathematics doctoral student. “We want viewers to connect with STEM topics through the artwork they see.”

Artists drew inspiration for their creations from their work in the field, lab and classroom, using microscopes, cameras, watercolor and acrylic paints, screen printing and more to capture the artistic side of science and bring their research to life.

“This event demonstrates that art can be found everywhere — even in cells viewed under a microscope,” Green said.

“This event demonstrates that art can be found everywhere — even in cells viewed under a microscope.”

— Kaylie Green, 2025-2026 GWIS president and third-year biomathematics doctoral student

Jennifer Scheckowitz, an undergraduate majoring in physical science in the Department of Physics, is among this year’s featured artists. Her piece, “Heart in Malachite,” highlights the hidden beauty of geological microscopy — analyzing rock, mineral and soil samples to understand geological processes, environmental history and fluid interactions.

Using the depth composition feature on a Keyence VHX-7000 digital microscope, Scheckowitz captured multiple photos of the malachite crystal at different focal points and stitched the images together to produce one cohesive photograph, highlighting the shape of a heart appearing in the light-green stone.

“When I first got the opportunity to explore different forms of microscopy, I was immediately captivated by how rocks and minerals looked under a microscope,” said Scheckowitz, who also participated in the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. “I spent a lot of time taking pictures of the microscopic surfaces of many different geological specimens, but the malachite was by far the most interesting to me.”

Scheckowitz’s research was conducted through the Microscopic BioArt research project under the Nanobio Materials and Robotics group led by Jamel Ali, associate professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, and based at the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Beyond its artistic appeal, geological microscopy is an effective and valuable learning tool for students and amateur geologists, preparing Scheckowitz for future research in physical science and chemical engineering. Her additional artworks in the exhibit, “Biotite Schist under UV Light” and “Sodalite Crystal,” showcase the range and beauty of photomicroscopy.

“While many geological subjects may look identical to the naked eye, employing a microscope reveals fascinating new structures and hidden differences between them,” Scheckowitz said. “It highlights structural features that often go unnoticed, revealing a whole new world just on the surface of a rock.”

Art in STEM encourages the FSU community to engage with various scientific topics, providing an aesthetic entry point for viewers to learn about the innovative research conducted by undergraduate and graduate students across programs.

“This exhibition seamlessly connects art and science,” Scheckowitz said. “I believe that art fosters innovation — the two are intertwined. Artistic experimentation mirrors scientific development, and it’s important to highlight the similarities between the two.”

For more information or to view the 2026 Art in STEM digital exhibition, visit  artinstem.create.fsu.edu. The exhibition will remain in the Dirac Science Library through the summer.

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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.”

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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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