A team lead by Iowa State Professor and Ames Laboratory Researcher Jigang Wang demonstrated that THz light can be used to control some of the essential quantum properties of superconducting states, including macroscopic supercurrent flowing, broken symmetry and accessing certain very high frequency quantum oscillations thought to be forbidden by symmetry.
Wang and his collaborators – Xu Yang, Chirag Vaswani and Liang Luo from Iowa State, responsible for terahertz instrumentation and experiments; Chris Sundahl, Jong-Hoon Kang and Chang-Beom Eom from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, responsible for high-quality superconducting materials and their characterizations; Martin Mootz and Ilias E. Perakis from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, responsible for model building and theoretical simulations – are advancing the quantum frontier by finding new macroscopic supercurrent flowing states and developing quantum controls for switching and modulating them.
More details can be found in the Iowa State University Press Release.