Control quantum matter with light.
Simulate it with electrons.
Our research threads the fine line between condensed matter and optics. We bring the concepts of optics to two-dimensional materials — and the techniques of 2D materials back to optics — to dream big on the nanoscale.
Two programmes, one question: what else can a material be?
Imagine that a single photon could carry the field of an entire high-fluence mid-infrared pulse. What would happen? How does light–matter interaction look when light and matter are both quantum? Thanks to a new generation of polaritonic cavities we invented, these questions are no longer hypothetical — and in graphene, we can watch electrons answer a parallel question as waves.
Cavity-Controlled Matter
Using the vacuum field itself to control quantum matter. Extreme light confinement and hyperbolic polaritons let us compress light far below its wavelength, until empty space becomes strong enough to rewrite what a material does.
Explore the programme → Pillar 02Graphene Quantum Simulation
Electrons in graphene travel like light: they refract, focus, and interfere. We build electron-optical circuits that turn a sheet of carbon into a programmable simulator for quantum wave physics.
Explore the programme →Instruments most labs do not have
Original questions need original hardware. Our experiments sit at the meeting point of cryogenic quantum transport and high-field ultrafast optics — a combination that is rare anywhere.
Cryogenic transport
Low-temperature electrical measurement of 2D devices, where ballistic electrons stay coherent long enough to behave like beams of light.
High-power mid-infrared ultrafast laser
Drives high-field experiments, including Floquet engineering — dressing a material with intense light until its band structure is no longer the one it was grown with.
Visible time-resolved exciton spectroscopy
Follows excitons as they are born, move and decay, resolving the fast dynamics that steady-state measurements average away.
Backed to take the long shot
A serious place to learn, and a warm one
We are starting a great scientific adventure — full of serious experimental work and bold creativity. The training here is deliberate: you learn to design an experiment, to build the thing that measures it, and to say clearly why it matters.
Experiments take time and substantial effort, and some of them fail. That is not a failure of the scientist; it is how the science actually works. We plan for it, we learn from it, and we keep going.
We are always looking for motivated students and postdocs.
If a question here made you want to argue with it, that is a good sign. Write to Hanan with a CV and a short introduction — tell us what you would want to measure.
Email Hanan