One of the highlights in the Physics World calendar was the announcement of their Breakthrough of the Year, which was made this year on 17 December 2020.
This year’s Top 10 Breakthroughs were selected by a crack team of five Physics World editors, who have sifted through hundreds of research updates published on the website this year. In addition to having been reported in Physics World in 2020, the selections must meet the following criteria:
- Significant advance in knowledge or understanding.
- Importance of work for scientific progress and/or development of real-world applications.
- Of general interest to Physics World readers.
Associate Professor Cheng-Wei Qiu and his team, who had been chosen by Physics World’s editorial team as one of the magazine’s “Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year” for 2020 for their work builds on the discovery of “magic-angle” graphene – by using twisted layers of 2D materials to change the behaviour of propagating photons, rather than electrons.
EXPANDING TWISTRONICS TO PHOTONS
Associate Professor Cheng-Wei Qiu from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and an international team of collaborators at the City University of New York, National University of Singapore, Monash University, China University of Geosciences and the University of Texas at Austin, for showing that dispersion- and diffraction-free propagation of light is possible, with a resolution that beats the diffraction limit by more than an order of magnitude, in twisted layers of 2D molybdenum trioxide. Their work builds on the discovery of “magic-angle” graphene – Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2018 – by using twisted layers of 2D materials to change the behaviour of propagating photons, rather than electrons. Just as the electron version of twistronics has led to a flurry of research on superconductivity and electron states, the new photonics variant has important implications for nano-imaging, quantum optics, computing and low-energy optical signal processing.
To read more: please visit https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-world-announces-its-breakthrough-of-the-year-finalists-for-2020/
