Some materials have remarkable quantum properties that could pave the way for next-generation technologies, from ultra-efficient electronics to powerful batteries. But there’s a catch: these special behaviors are usually hidden in the material’s natural state. To reveal them, scientists need a clever way to gently coax them out.
One powerful method involves hitting the material with extremely short pulses of light. These pulses can subtly shift how atoms and electrons interact at the microscopic level, allowing the material’s hidden quantum properties to briefly emerge. The problem? These light-induced states vanish almost instantly, often lasting just trillionths of a second. That makes them hard to study, let alone use in real-world devices.
In rare cases, these states last a bit longer, but scientists still don’t fully understand why, and there’s no clear rulebook for how to create them on demand.
Now, researchers from Harvard University, working with colleagues at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, have taken a major step forward. By carefully tuning the symmetry of electronic states in a copper oxide material, they managed to create a quantum state that sticks around for several nanoseconds—about a thousand times longer than usual. They achieved this using the powerful SwissFEL X-ray laser, which helped them trigger and observe this unusually long-lived behavior.
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