Imagine you are swimming in the sea, in clear and beautiful waters. Isn’t that nice? But then, the night falls, it’s dark, and you can’t see anything! I bet you’d like to find a lighthouse to guide you to the shore. This situation is actually very similar to our knowledge of new materials. Let me explain.

With our powerful computers and new AI capabilities, we are discovering every year hundreds and hundreds of new materials with amazing properties. If we use them well, we can solve real important problems: save more energy in our daily lives, treat cancer and other diseases much more effectively, or even help mitigate climate change. But I said “if”… 

Navigating this sea of new materials without guidance can be difficult. It is sometimes challenging to understand why materials behave the way they do. And, if we don’t understand why they behave the way they do, we just cannot use them to create new technologies and solve these problems! 

This is where I come in. But, while you may do an experiment at the Molecular Foundry or solve complex equations at our Lab’s supercomputer, I do the exact opposite of that! I understand materials by creating simple theoretical models. Like a lighthouse illuminating through a dark sea, my models allow me to spot what’s important from what’s not. 

Let me give you an example. I’ve recently focused my attention on a new type of materials, called altermagnets, that have the potential to revolutionize how computers work. I started by identifying what makes these materials so special. Then, I went to my blackboard and wrote as few formulas as possible that still let me reproduce such unique properties. The result: I discovered simple yet general ground rules that govern these materials. And then I used these rules to predict other new and exciting phenomena. This new information is very important, because now I can inform our colleagues at the Molecular Foundry about what kind of experiment to perform or which specific material to pick from the hundreds and hundreds available, and in this way saving them time, resources, and also from drowning in all this new material data. 

As you have seen, I help you understand how new materials behave, so you can bring new technologies to life. My theoretical work and my simple models are a lighthouse in the vast sea of new materials.

Imagine you’re watching your favorite band perform, or your favorite sports team compete. You’re sitting in the crowd, so focused on the show that you don’t notice the wave crashing upon you. But don’t worry, it’s not a tsunami – it’s the good kind of wave: the collective motion of thousands of fans. You stand, throw your hands up, and almost as soon as it passes, the wave has traveled all the way to the other end of the stadium.

Magnetism works in a similar way. In a magnetic material, each tiny atom itself has its own magnetic moment - a north and a south, just like the magnet on your refrigerator. These magnetic moments ripple together - moving information in ways that could revolutionize our electronics.

Computers rely on pushing charges around. This wastes energy, making your phone heat up when you get a lot of texts and calls - which I hear is an issue that popular people have to deal with. This wasted energy shortens battery life and harms the environment. Imagine instead if we could do computation using magnetic waves – allowing us to process information with far less energy.

Think about it: a stadium wave sweeps around in seconds, while running through the crowd to deliver the same message would take far longer - especially if you have to push past many sweaty fans. 

At Berkeley Lab, my colleagues and I study how magnetic moments ripple together like the wave in the audience. Some researchers here look closely at single magnetic moments, while others treat the whole crowd as one averaged smoothed wave. My work connects these scales – asking when it’s accurate to describe magnetism as individual moments, and when the collective picture is more meaningful. Using the supercomputer just below us, I run simulations to watch these patterns emerge on my computer screen.

By bridging theory and experiment – from atoms to what we can see – at Berkeley Lab we’re exploring how ripples in the crowd can transport information – opening the door to a wave of exciting new energy efficient electronics.

So next time you’re in a stadium making every moment count – remember that we’re in the lab, trying to make magnetic moments literally count.

Imagine a time, when your most personal information, like your bank details or private messages, could easily be accessed by others. Sounds scary, right?

Today, we rely on classical encryption to keep our data safe. However, the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that it is possible to build a machine that can crack the classically encoded data in a matter of a second.

But don’t worry: the very thing that is threatening your digital security, can also be the same thing that saves it. Simply, for you to be protected against such quantum cyber-attacks, you need quantum encryption. And to make that possible, let me tell you one thing that you will need. A light source of a special type. A single photon emitter – a light source that emits one particle of light at a time.

Physicists have realized the importance of these sources and are actively trying to find the perfect emitter. And we still don’t have an answer. So far, they are taking from thousands to millions of such tiny emitters and studying them at the same time.

Think about it, if all you here are trying to tell me something about yourselves at the same time. Will I be able to understand you? Of course, no! That’s why, we are building a new tool at the Molecular Foundry that allows us to listen to each of these tiny emitters individually with an atomic precision! We use a needle, like in my background, that is so sharp at the tip and place it close to the emitter. Electrons from this needle will jump to the material makes it shine! I am excited to share with you that our tool is already working nicely and giving its first results. 

We hope to find an answer for how and why certain systems emit single photons, and not only that we can engineer them to design better and more reliable photon sources, so that when such a time comes, we will all be protected and ready, with one photon at a time. And the future is not scary anymore!