FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers contribute to landmark study demonstrating ultra-low noise levels in innovative qubit platform

Florida State University and FAMU-FSU College of Engineering faculty members Wei Guo and Xianjing Zhou are part of a multi-institution research team whose latest findings advance one of the most promising platforms in quantum computing.

A new qubit, the fundamental building block of quantum information processing, invented at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory exhibits noise levels thousands of times lower than those of most traditional qubits. The study was published in Nature Electronics.

Noise refers to disturbances in the environment that diminish a qubit’s performance. The platform is built by trapping single electrons on the surface of frozen neon gas, and the recent findings position it as a strong contender in the field of high-performance quantum technologies.

The new study was jointly led by Argonne and the University of Notre Dame. Faculty at Florida State University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and Northeastern University collaborated on the research.

“One of the biggest obstacles in quantum computing is finding a material environment that is quiet enough for qubits to survive, yet practical enough for building larger systems,” said Guo, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and researcher at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. “This study shows that solid neon offers a very compelling combination of cleanliness, stability and resilience. That is exactly the kind of foundation we need if we want quantum hardware to become more robust and scalable.”

Quantum computing: Potentially transformative, but challenged by noise

Today’s computers and smartphones run on bits, which are tiny switches that can be either 0 or 1. Quantum computers use a special kind of bit known as qubits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time. What’s more, the state of one qubit can instantly affect another qubit’s state, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet.

The remarkable properties of qubits can endow quantum computers with exponentially greater computational power than that of classical computers. This opens the door to solving challenging problems like inventing disease-curing drugs, advancing materials design, enabling secure communication and optimizing complex supply chains.

Yet quantum computers are still an emerging technology. Qubits are extremely sensitive to noise — tiny disturbances in the environment such as electromagnetic fields, heat and particle vibrations. As a result, qubits tend to have short coherence times, meaning they can only retain information for a fraction of a second.

Most of today’s chip-based qubits are made of semiconducting or superconducting materials. But these qubits are often challenged by noise from material defects, embedded charges and fabrication variability. The electron-on-neon qubit has the potential to address these limitations.

Solid neon is less noisy

In 2022, Argonne scientists at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science user facility, invented a fundamentally new type of qubit made by freezing neon gas into a solid and spraying electrons from a light bulb filament onto the solid. A special electrode traps a single electron just above the neon’s surface. The electron serves as the qubit, with the electron’s motion in space representing the qubit’s 0 and 1 states.

In this platform, electrons reside in a vacuum just above the neon surface rather than deep inside a conventional solid, which means they are naturally less exposed to the defects and fluctuating environments that often limit qubit performance in other solid-state platforms. Earlier studies had already shown that electrons on solid neon could function as qubits and achieve remarkably strong coherence under highly protected conditions. This new work takes an important next step by showing that the platform remains quiet and functional under less ideal conditions more relevant to future quantum hardware.

Testing for resilience

The study evaluated the platform’s quietness with a systematic noise characterization. Rather than testing the device only under its most protected operating condition, the team examined how the qubit behaved away from the charge-insensitive “sweet spot” and at elevated temperatures, where environmental disturbances become more consequential, allowing researchers to probe the practical resilience of the platform under realistic operating conditions.

The study team found that the noise in the neon qubit platform is 10 to 10,000 times lower than that in most semiconducting qubits and rivals the lowest semiconductor noise records. The researchers also found that the qubits can maintain coherence times above 1 microsecond at temperatures up to 400 millikelvins, a noteworthy result because quantum devices generally become more vulnerable to decoherence as temperature rises.

“Our work shows that solid neon is not only an exceptionally clean host for trapped-electron qubits, but also a surprisingly robust one,” said Xianjing Zhou, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and a corresponding author of the paper. “That is exciting because reducing noise and relaxing temperature constraints are both essential for pushing quantum devices beyond carefully protected laboratory demonstrations toward more realistic technologies.”

That temperature robustness could prove especially valuable for scaling. Quantum processors typically operate at extremely low temperatures, where cooling power is limited and system engineering becomes increasingly difficult. A qubit platform that remains coherent at higher temperatures could ease one of the major bottlenecks in building larger and more practical quantum systems.

“By carefully characterizing the noise seen by the qubit, we can begin to understand why this platform performs so well and where further improvements can be made,” said Xu Han, scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and co-corresponding author of the study. “That insight is important as we work toward more advanced trapped-electron quantum devices.”

A growing quantum hub in Tallahassee

Guo’s and Zhou’s contributions to this research reflect a broader and growing investment in quantum science taking shape at FSU.

Florida State University’s Quantum Initiative aims to advance quantum science and engineering and accelerate the development of technologies that could reshape computing, communication, sensing and understanding of the physical world. The FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, in partnership with Florida A&M University, is establishing the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.

Together, these institutional investments are helping build a strong regional ecosystem for quantum research and education, creating opportunities for students to engage in cutting-edge research, deepen their technical expertise and prepare for careers in the rapidly growing quantum workforce.

The study’s authors included Xu Han and Yizhong Huang at Argonne, and Xinhao Li, who was at Argonne when this research was conducted; Yutian Wen and Dafei Jin at the University of Notre Dame; Christopher S. Wang and Brennan Dizdar at the University of Chicago; Wei Guo and Xianjing Zhou at FSU and the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering; and Xufeng Zhang at Northeastern University.

The research was supported by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Argonne’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, Julian Schwinger Foundation for Physics Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Science Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, and the France and Chicago Collaborating in the Sciences program. Guo’s research was additionally supported by an NSF grant through Florida A&M University and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant through Florida State University.

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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 researcher has been awarded an international fellowship to develop new materials that contain quantum bits — the elementary units of quantum technologies — with eventual applications ranging from health care to cybersecurity.

Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Michael Shatruk has earned a 2025 Novo Nordisk Fellowship. Through 752,000 Danish kroner in funding, or about $117,000, the fellowship will allow Shatruk to study quantum molecule-based materials using advanced equipment housed at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen through early May.

“Quantum technologies are poised to revolutionize many areas, including computing, drug development and medical sensing,” Shatruk said. “This fellowship will allow me to carry out research on quantum materials with extensive use of electron-diffraction crystallography, a rare and cutting-edge method for determining the crystal structures of sub-micron particles, which are less than one-thousandth of a millimeter in size.”

Based in Denmark, Novo Nordisk is a global pharmaceutical company specializing in medical treatments for serious chronic diseases. As the producer of half of the world’s insulin, Novo Nordisk is a global leader in diabetes care and notable for developing insulin pens as well as GLP-1 weight loss medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Novo Nordisk is also Denmark’s largest private sponsor of fundamental research and supports a wide array of work across scientific disciplines, including Shatruk’s discovery of new quantum materials.

“Dr. Shatruk’s research is highly innovative and rich with transformative insights and effective realizations,” said Wei Yang, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “In the past decade, scholar development has been a major departmental focus, and Dr. Shatruk’s fellowship, which centers on improving quantum science and technology, is a testimony to FSU’s synergistic efforts.”

“Quantum” refers to the smallest possible unit of a material and is often associated with quantum computing, which can perform large tasks faster and more efficiently than classical computing through cutting-edge processing chips. The average laptop or phone has plenty of computing power for everyday use like internet surfing and building spreadsheets, for example.

However, industries involving artificial intelligence, health care, and scientific research often need to process large quantities of data to explore multiple possibilities at once — quantum computing’s specialty. Quantum chips can “think” more complexly than typical computers as a result of qubits, or atomic-sized particles engineered for their unique ability to represent multiple values simultaneously.

“While in Denmark, I plan to work on the systems that create two-dimensional arrays of qubits, which are the building blocks of chips used in quantum devices,” Shatruk said. “The focus of my project is to study molecular spin qubits placed in the nodes of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, to increase computing stability and power. The discovery of MOFs was recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, so it is fun to work in this field immediately after it received such great recognition.”

MOFs are crystalline structures that are built from metallic ions connected by organic molecules to form a porous material that is readily customizable for specific tasks, including the slow, controlled release of drugs in the body. By integrating MOFs in quantum chips, Shatruk aims to target stability issues in current quantum technology. Most MOFs are smaller than one micron, while a single strand of human hair is about 70 microns in diameter. “Large” MOF crystals are still under one millimeter in size.

“Unfortunately, it is difficult to grow large MOF crystals, so many of them cannot be studied using traditional single-crystal X-ray crystallography methods,” Shatruk said. “The electron-diffraction crystallography machinery in Denmark will help determine the atomic structures of MOFs, even if large crystals cannot be grown, because it enables crystal structure determination on sub-micron particles.”

In 2023, Shatruk became the founding director of the FSU Initiative in Quantum Science and Engineering. With an initial investment of more than $20 million from FSU over three years, the initiative aims to accelerate the discovery of novel quantum phenomena that can impact the design of quantum-related systems.

Visit the FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry website to learn more about Shatruk’s work and research. Visit quantum.fsu.edu to learn more about the FSU Initiative in Quantum Science.

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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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Florida State University researchers have created a new crystalline material with unusual magnetic patterns that could be used for breakthroughs in data storage and quantum technologies.

In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the research team showed that when two materials with neighboring chemical compositions but different structure types are combined, they can form a new material that exhibits a third structure type with highly unusual magnetic properties.

Atoms in magnetic materials act as extremely small magnets, due to the property known as atomic spin. The spin can be imagined as an arrow indicating the direction of the tiny magnetic field produced by each atom. When many such spins add up, they can produce bulk magnetism by aligning their magnetic fields in the same or opposite directions. This is what happens in traditional magnets, such as those that are used in our computers and cell phones.

The FSU research team showed that their approach can be used to generate much more complex patterns of spins. These patterns are important because they determine a material’s overall magnetic properties. In contrast to the traditional magnets, the spins in this new material form repeating swirls, also known as spin textures.

How it works

The researchers combined two chemically similar compounds with different symmetries in their crystal structures. This structural mismatch leads to “frustration,” which indicates that both structure types become inherently unstable at the boundary between two chemical compositions.

“We thought that maybe this structural frustration would translate into magnetic frustration,’” said co-author Michael Shatruk, a professor in the FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “If the structures are in competition, maybe that will cause the spins to twist. Let’s find some structures that are chemically very close but have different symmetries.”

They combined a compound of manganese, cobalt and germanium with a compound of manganese, cobalt and arsenic. Germanium and arsenic are neighbors in the periodic table.

After the mixture solidified into crystals, the research team examined the product and found the distinctive cycloidal spin textures that they were seeking. Such swirls of spins are known as skyrmion-like spin textures, and the search for more ways to find and manipulate skyrmion-hosting materials is a cutting-edge research area within chemistry and physics.

To determine this skyrmion-like magnetic structure, the team collected single-crystal neutron diffraction data on the TOPAZ instrument at the Spallation Neutron Source, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Why it matters

This research could be used to develop hard drives with greater information density or improve electron-transport efficiency. Because using magnets to move skyrmions takes little energy, incorporating materials with these magnetic patterns into electronic devices could reduce power consumption. In massive supercomputers with thousands of processors, these lower power loads can lead to huge savings in electrical and cooling costs.

The research could also help point scientists and engineers toward promising materials that can help develop fault-tolerant quantum computing, which can protect fragile quantum information and operate reliably despite errors and noise — the holy grail of quantum information processing.

“With single-crystal neutron diffraction data from TOPAZ and new data-reduction and machine-learning tools from our LDRD project, we can now solve very complex magnetic structures with much greater confidence,” said Xiaoping Wang, a distinguished neutron scattering scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “That capability lets us move from simply finding unusual spin textures to intentionally designing and optimizing them for future information and quantum technologies.”

‘Chemical Thinking’ and materials by design

Previous research into skyrmions and related complex spin textures has been more like a hunt: considering different materials where these magnetic shapes were likely to be present and measuring their properties to confirm.

This study took a different approach. By creating a new material and leveraging the innovative idea of structural frustration, the researchers sought to better understand the principles that lead to the development of new magnetic patterns.

“It’s chemical thinking, because we’re thinking about how the balance between these structures affects them and the relation between them, and then how it might translate to the relation between atomic spins,” Shatruk said.

That understanding of the fundamental science at work could point to promising directions for future research.

“The idea is to be able to predict where these complex spin textures will appear,” said co-author Ian Campbell, a graduate student in Shatruk’s lab. “Traditionally, physicists will hunt for known materials that already exhibit the symmetry they’re seeking and measure their properties. But that limits the range of possibilities. We’re trying to develop a predictive ability to say, ‘If we add these two things together, we’ll form a completely new material with these desired properties.’”

A benefit of that approach is the ability to expand the ingredient list for making materials that contain skyrmion-like spin textures, allowing for cheaper, easier-to-grow crystals and a more robust supply chain for future technologies that might benefit from such materials.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Fellowship

Campbell completed part of this work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, or ORNL, while on an FSU-supported fellowship.

“That experience was instrumental for this research,” he said. “Being at Oak Ridge allowed me to build connections with the scientists there and use their expertise to help with some of the problems we had to solve to complete this study.”

FSU has been a sponsoring member of Oak Ridge Associated Universities since 1951 and is also a core university partner of the national laboratory.

Through that partnership, FSU faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students have the opportunity to visit ORNL to use their facilities and develop research collaborations with ORNL staff members.

Collaboration and support

Other co-authors on this paper were YiXu Wang, Zachary P. Tener, Judith K. Clark, Jacnel Graterol with the FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Andrei Rogalev and Fabrice Wilhelm from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility; Hu Zhang and Yi Long from the University of Science and Technology Beijing; Richard Dronskowski from RWTH Aachen University; and Xiaoping Wang from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The study used facilities at Florida State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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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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When he decided to major in physics, Florida State University student Nolan Scales was excited to delve into science and to explore research. But he didn’t know that research would be quantum physics. 

Today, Scales is a senior in the Department of Physics and a research assistant in the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab), where he helps study superconductors and quantum tunneling, a phenomenon in which a particle passes through a barrier that it shouldn’t have enough energy to move through. 

“I’ve always liked the idea of quantum, but I didn’t know all that much about it until last year,” he said. “The more I found out about it, the more I saw the applications where it could be useful for the future.” 

Scales was among the students who attended a showcase of quantum science and engineering last week at the Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building. The event, led by Assistant Professor of Physics Cyprian Lewandowski as part of FSU Discovery Days, highlighted the FSU Quantum Initiative with a special focus on explaining the latest research in quantum science and engineering to undergraduates and showing how students can get involved in research. 

The United Nations is celebrating 2025 as the Year of Quantum Science and Technology, marking 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics and looking forward to the future possibilities in this field. Potential applications of new quantum breakthroughs include precise sensors, unbreakable encryption or quantum computers that can solve certain complex problems exponentially faster than classical computers.

“Quantum is incredibly important for technologies that will make a huge impact on our world,” said Mike Shatruk, director of FSU Quantum. “At FSU Quantum, we are building a comprehensive program to develop the workforce that will develop future breakthroughs.” 

FSU Quantum is home to faculty research published in top journals. Along with that work, faculty leading the initiative are developing a graduate certificate in Quantum Information Science and Technology, which will be the first program offering certified quantum education in Florida. They are also creating an undergraduate quantum science lab and providing a short course for high school students to introduce them to quantum computing. 

The initiative positions FSU to continue making an impact in this field, both in research and training. 

“FSU has emerged as a regional and national leader in research on quantum information science and technology,” Shatruk said. “Our faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars and fellows are pushing the boundaries of knowledge, driving innovative technologies critical to our nation’s security and prosperity.” 

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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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An international research collaboration featuring scientists from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory discovered a fundamental universal principle that governs how microscopic whirlpools interact, collide and transform within quantum fluids, which also has implications for understanding fluids that behave according to classical physics.

The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed new insights into vortex dynamics within superfluid helium, a remarkable liquid that exhibits zero-resistance flow at temperatures approaching absolute zero. The research demonstrates that when these quantum vortices intersect and reconnect, they separate faster than their initial approach velocity, creating bursts of energy that characterize turbulence in both quantum and classical fluids.

“Superfluids offer a uniquely clear perspective on turbulence,” said FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Professor Wei Guo, a study co-author. “We’re beginning to understand the universal physics that connect quantum and classical worlds, and that’s an exciting frontier for both science and technology.”

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Quantum computers hold the potential to revolutionize the possibilities for solving difficult computational problems that would take classical computers many years to resolve. But for those computers to meet their potential, they need working quantum bits, or qubits. The hunt for a better qubit is a major project of researchers around the world, who are trying different materials and methods in their search. 

In a study published in Progress in Quantum Electronics, researchers from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering explored an unconventional and promising approach to building qubits by using quantum fluids and solids. Their article examined how electrons trapped just above the surfaces of ultraclean quantum fluids and solids such as liquid helium and solid neon offer a combination of chip-level control and ultra-clean, defect-free environments, presenting a promising path toward scalable, high-fidelity qubits that could overcome key limitations of existing quantum technologies. 

“This platform blends the best of both worlds,” said Wei Guo, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and co-author of the paper. “The electron resides in high vacuum above a pristine material surface, and at the same time, we can use chip-based microwave technologies to control and read out its state. That’s a very powerful combination.” 

To make qubits work well, designers seek to optimize a few key parameters. One parameter is coherence time, a measurement of how long a qubit can maintain its complex quantum state. Other important parameters include gate fidelity, or the probability that qubit operations will process correctly, and scalability, or the ease at which large numbers of qubits can be manufactured. 

Current front-runner platforms, such as superconducting qubits and trapped-ion qubits, have drawbacks. Superconducting qubits are compatible with existing chip fabrication and ideal for scaling, but material defects limit their fidelity, requiring many physical qubits to form one reliable logical qubit. Trapped ions, on the other hand, offer long coherence times and high gate fidelities due to their vacuum isolation, but scaling up these systems is constrained by complex control hardware. 

The review article highlights an emerging alternative: using electrons confined above the surface of quantum fluids or solids, exotic materials that exist only at cryogenic temperatures. These electrons can be precisely manipulated via on-chip microwave circuits — like superconducting qubits — while also benefiting from a vacuum-like environment free of material defects — like trapped ions. This hybrid advantage offers a potential path to high-fidelity, scalable qubits without the compromises of current systems. 

The article draws on a growing body of work in the field, including important contributions from Guo’s group. In 2022, a team involving Guo demonstrated quantum bit operation using electrons on solid neon, a breakthrough that received wide attention. More recently, his group revealed how electrons can spontaneously bind to surface features on solid neon, forming new quantum states that impact qubit behavior. 

The review also incorporates major developments in electron-on-helium qubits and other quantum fluids and solids-based platforms by researchers worldwide. It serves as a unified and accessible reference for scientists, especially those outside the small quantum materials community, interested in exploring these emerging approaches to quantum device development. By bridging quantum materials science and quantum information engineering, the article lays the groundwork for new directions in qubit design, which could help unlock the full promise of quantum computing. 

“If there’s no quantum bit, then whatever algorithm you develop, there’s no use,” Guo said. “The quantum fluids and solids field is fairly small. The people in this field understand the properties of quantum fluids and solids. But for the much larger quantum information science field, people are not familiar with materials like superfluid helium and solid neon, and how they could be used to make qubits. Now, even researchers and engineers outside this field can use this information to do their design work.” 

The idea for the review originated at a workshop hosted by the FSU Quantum Initiative. Co-authors include Denis Konstantinov of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and Dafei Jin of the University of Notre Dame. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Julian Schwinger Foundation for Physics Research, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

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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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