The Simon Lab at The University of Chicago

Matter is typically made of electrons and ions. By developing tools to build materials from photons, we learn about the underpinnings of material properties, and have an opportunity to create matter which previously existed only in the minds of theorists.

A new generation of materials has revealed that "hidden", non-local order can have far-reaching implications on material properties. These exotic properties often evade detection in the bulk, and manifest as unidirectional edge states, or even more fascinatingly, appear to bind a giant magnet to each quasi-particle, inducing exotic braiding statistics via Aharanov-Bohm phases.