atoms thick.
These ultrathin structures, called resonators, can manipulate light in powerful ways—despite being invisible to the naked eye.
This breakthrough could lead to major advances in optical technology, from faster internet and more energy-efficient computers to better sensors and quantum research.
The research was led by Professor Andreas Tittl and his team at LMU (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) and published in Nature Photonics.
Their goal was to design incredibly small devices that can capture and use light with much greater efficiency than ever before.
At the heart of this new technology are special materials known as metasurfaces.
These are surfaces covered with tiny patterns smaller than the wavelength of light, which allows them to bend, trap, and control light in very precise ways.
Tittl’s team took this concept a step further by combining metasurfaces with 2D materials—crystal-like sheets only one or two atoms thick.
The most famous of these 2D materials is graphene, but many others now exist. Tittl’s group used one called tungsten disulfide (WS₂), a semiconductor, and sandwiched it between protective layers of hexagonal boron nitride.
What makes this approach special is that they built the light-capturing structure directly into the layers of these ultra-thin materials using a technique called nanolithography.
The resulting structures—called van der Waals heterostructure metasurfaces (vdW-HMs)—interact with light extremely efficiently.
When light hits these materials, it excites electrons, which then pair with light particles (photons) to form new, hybrid particles called exciton-polaritons.
These strange particles behave like both light and matter and can even act together in harmony, similar to a unique state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
By carefully designing the structure of these materials, the researchers found a way to make them respond even to very weak light—up to 1,000 times less intense than what was needed in previous technologies.
This could lead to the development of tiny, flat optical components that do more with less energy.
Lead author Luca Sortino says the team now has a toolkit to explore many other combinations of 2D materials. In the future, these devices could power fast optical switches, energy-saving computer chips, light-based neural networks, and new tools for studying quantum physics.
The team is continuing to test these possibilities, hoping their new method will open the door to a wide range of high-tech applications.
Source: KSR.
