When you press a switch, the world snaps back as if nothing had happened. In some materials, something stays — a faint imprint of what just took place.
We study a strange kind of memory that lives inside matter itself. Not the memory of a computer chip, or the memory of a brain. The memory of atoms — billions of them, arranged into a sheet so thin you can see through it, that somehow keep a record of what's been done to them.
In our lab we build these materials, twist them, pull them, and cool them down close to absolute zero. Then we ask a simple question: what does the material remember? Sometimes the answer rewrites textbooks. Sometimes it tells us we asked the wrong question.
"We don't try to make memory. We try to figure out why some kinds of matter can't help making it."
This matters because everything you use that stores information — from your phone to a medical implant — relies on materials that hold a state. Quantum materials promise to do this with a tiny fraction of the energy, and possibly in ways that don't degrade. But before any of that can be engineered, we have to understand the physics.
If you find this kind of question exciting, the rest of this page is for you. Read on to see how we work, who's in the team, and how to join.