A team of physicists in the United States has created exotic forms of matter that do not exist under normal conditions. They did it by simply changing a magnetic field over time.
The work, led by Cal Poly Physics Department Lecturer Ian Powell and student researcher Louis Buchalter, was published in Physical Review B. Their paper is titled "Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering."
How time itself becomes a tool for building new matter
Powell and Buchalter studied how matter behaves at extremely small scales, including atoms, electrons, and photons. They found that when magnetic fields are changed in a controlled, time-dependent way, they can generate quantum states that have no static counterpart. In other words, these states do not exist in materials that remain unchanged over time.
"The central idea is that useful quantum properties can depend not just on what a material is, but on how it is driven in time," Powell said. "In our case, we show that periodically changing a magnetic field can produce driven quantum phases with no static counterpart."
Why this matters for quantum computing
By carefully timing how magnetic fields are applied, scientists can design quantum systems with properties that are more stable and less vulnerable to noise or imperfections. These disruptions are a major challenge in quantum technology, often leading to errors in calculations or system performance.
Powell noted that the most direct industry relevance of the study is to quantum computing and quantum simulation, rather than to a specific end-use sector at this stage. Any eventual impact on areas like pharmaceuticals, finance, manufacturing or aerospace would likely be indirect, by contributing to the longer-term development of better quantum technologies.
The findings suggest new ways to create and study these unusual quantum states in controlled settings such as ultracold-atom experiments. To move toward industry use, the next steps would be experimental validation.
This breakthrough suggests that the future of quantum technology may depend not just on what materials are made of, but how they are manipulated in time.
