Bangladeshi scientist leads discovery of novel quantum state of matter

[Mehedi hasan]

A Bangladeshi physicist of Princeton University has led an international research team in discovering a novel quantum state of matter that can be 'tuned' at will - and it's 10 times more tunable than existing theories can explain.

M Zahid Hasan and his team's discovery of this level of manipulability of quantum matter opens up enormous possibilities for next-generation nanotechnologies and quantum computing.

Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, shot to fame in 2014 when he led a team of scientists discovering 'Weyl fermion', an elusive massless particle theorised 85 years ago. In pursuit to an alternative theory of gravity, Albert Einstein's colleague at Princeton, physicist Hermann Weyl, first predicted the particle back in 1929.

"We found a new control knob for the quantum topological world , says Zahid Hasan

About the latest discovery, considered a potential gamechanger in quantum physics, Prof Zahid Hasan said, "We found a new control knob for the quantum topological world. We expect this is tip of the iceberg. There will be a new subfield of materials or physics grown out of this. ... This would be a fantastic playground for nanoscale engineering."

Hasan and his colleagues, whose research - "Giant and anisotropic spin-orbit tunability in a strongly correlated kagome magnet" - appears in the current issue of Nature, are calling their discovery a "novel" quantum state of matter because it is not explained by existing theories of material properties.