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Penn State physicist details quasiparticle control in van der Waals materials

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November 6, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

At 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, Penn State’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering will host a public seminar on controlling quantum materials. Yinming Shao, Downsbrough Early Career Professor of Physics at Penn State, will present research focused on van der Waals materials, which offer unique opportunities to confine and control quasiparticles.

“Our understanding of complex quantum materials is established on the notion of quasiparticles,” Shao said, “which includes fermions, bosons and anyons that are the building blocks of future quantum hardware.” The seminar will detail a previously unidentified optical excitation discovered in layered quantum materials, alongside new approaches for manipulating light and electronic behaviors at nanoscale dimensions.

Van der Waals Materials Enable Quasiparticle Confinement

Van der Waals materials offer a pathway to confine light through hyperbolic phonon polaritons, a phenomenon Yinming Shao will detail in his seminar on Thursday, October 29, at 3:05 p.m. in 10 Sparks Building. This extreme confinement, enabled by the strong optical anisotropy of chromium sulfur bromide, allows for manipulation of light at scales far below its wavelength.

The approach represents a departure from traditional methods of optical control, using the unique properties of these layered materials to achieve nanoscale precision. Shao’s research extends beyond light to include the control of graphene plasmons using van der Waals ferroelectric materials, demonstrating a versatile toolkit for manipulating electronic and optical excitations.

He uses optical spectroscopy and nano-imaging tools to investigate quasiparticles within these layered quantum materials, seeking to uncover and control these collective excitations. Recent investigations have revealed a previously unidentified optical excitation within these layered materials, a discovery Shao will present alongside his confinement strategies. The ability to both discover and control these excitations is critical, as it allows researchers to engineer novel optical and electronic behaviors with potential applications in advanced technologies.

In 2025, Shao received an Early Career Research Program award from the U.S., recognizing the potential of his work to advance the field. His research has been published in journals including Nature Physics and Science.

Our understanding of complex quantum materials is established on the notion of quasiparticles, which includes fermions, bosons and anyons that are the building blocks of future quantum hardware.

Yinming Shao, Downsbrough Early Career Professor of Physics at Penn State
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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