Room-Temperature Quantum Speed

Room-Temperature Quantum Speed

“There’s nothing faster than light,” says Northeastern physicist Gregory Fiete, “and we’re using light to control material properties at essentially the fastest possible speed allowed by physics.” It’s the kind of quote you expect from a sci-fi film trailer, but it’s not fiction—it’s the dazzling promise of a new scientific breakthrough that could torch the entire foundation of modern electronics and reboot it in the image of quantum speed.

We may be witnessing the quiet shift, a shift no less impactful than our planets tectonic plates.

In a paper published just days ago in Nature Physics, researchers from Northeastern University revealed a method to toggle a quantum material between conducting and insulating states—at speeds and temperatures that are no longer science fiction. Using a finely tuned technique known as thermal quenching, the team successfully induced a metallic state in 1T-TaS₂ (tantalum disulfide), a layered quantum material previously thought to only conduct under extreme, cryogenic conditions.

Now, it works close to room temperature. And it stays that way. Are we talking "bi-stable"?

From Metal to Insulator—On Demand

The breakthrough centers around controlling what’s called a “hidden metallic charge density wave” (H-CDW) phase—a peculiar state in which electrons self-organize into periodic ripples inside the material. Historically, this state could only be triggered using ultrafast laser pulses, and it lasted mere fractions of a second at near-zero temperatures.

What Northeastern physicist Alberto de la Torre and his colleagues have shown is that the H-CDW phase can be stabilized using temperature alone. By heating the material above 350 K and then cooling it rapidly, the team accessed a metastable mixed state—one where both metallic and insulating regions coexist. They call it a dynamic phase transition. The result: a long-lived conductive state that doesn’t require lasers or liquid helium.

It holds for months.

Faster Than Fast

The implications? Silicon chips operate in the gigahertz range. This material, according to de la Torre, could enable switching at terahertz frequencies. That’s 1,000 times faster than what we use today—fast enough to make current processors feel like dial-up modems.

As physicist Gregory Fiete put it: “There’s nothing faster than light, and we’re using light to control material properties at essentially the fastest possible speed allowed by physics.”

That’s not hyperbole. In this experiment, the researchers demonstrated that light—used not to transmit data, but to literally rewrite the phase of matter—can turn a single quantum material into both conductor and insulator. No separate layers. No silicon. No traditional transistor. Just one programmable state of matter.

One Material, Two Personalities

Let’s break down how it works.

When cooled rapidly through a transition point, 1T-TaS₂ doesn’t behave like a neat solid—it becomes unpredictable. The process traps the material between two competing quantum phases: one that organizes electrons into a rigid insulating pattern (the commensurate CDW), and another that allows them to flow freely (the hidden metallic phase).

The result is a material that can be tuned to behave as both—depending on how you treat it thermally or optically.

What’s more, X-ray diffraction and tunneling spectroscopy confirmed that this mixed state has chiral symmetry breaking and semimetallic in-plane conduction, while the out-of-plane structure remains resistive—essentially allowing fine-grained control over current flow in multiple dimensions.

Why This Matters

The silicon roadmap is running out of space. Engineers are stacking chips vertically. Cooling systems are growing more complex. Each logic gate added to a chip brings us closer to physical limits.

Quantum materials like 1T-TaS₂ offer a new route—materials innovation rather than brute force scaling.

Rather than carving billions of transistors out of doped silicon and stringing them together, what if the material itself could behave like a switch? What if logic and memory could exist in a single flake of crystal, controlled with nothing more than a pulse of light or heat?

According to Fiete: “What we're shooting for is the highest level of control over material properties... something very fast, with a very certain outcome.”

That’s what this work achieves.

So, How Close Are We?

The published work demonstrates control at temperatures up to 210 K—much warmer than the cryogenic conditions typically required for such phases. That’s still below room temperature, but significantly closer to deployable hardware. With refinements, the method could be extended further.

There’s also no need for ultrafast lasers. Thermal quenching works with more accessible lab tools. Combined with the material’s stability over months, this gives engineers a feasible platform to prototype around.

The researchers make it clear: this isn’t quantum computing per se—but it may be just as transformative. It could lead to new classes of memory, logic devices, or adaptive electronics where one material replaces many.

The Bottom Line

Silicon is long from being dethroned—but it's being formally warned.

What de la Torre, Fiete, and their colleagues have achieved isn't a final product—it’s a proof that the physical laws we've depended on for decades are no longer the only game in town. Quantum materials are stepping up, not as lab curiosities, but as practical replacements—leaner, faster, and smarter.

And all it took was the right chill at the right time.

Sources:

Back to blog

Leave a comment