Quantum technology has promising potential to revolutionize how large and complex amounts of information are processed. While already in use primarily in laboratory and research settings globally, quantum technologies are in a transition phase for broader industry applications across many economic sectors.

Exploring unusual behavior in quantum matter
In researching fundamental aspects of quantum physics, or the behavior of nature at the smallest scales—involving atoms, electrons and photons—a study led by Cal Poly Physics Department Lecturer Ian Powell analyzed how a changing magnetic field can make matter behave in unusual ways.

Powell and student researcher Louis Buchalter, who graduated with a Cal Poly bachelor's degree in physics in 2025, published the article "Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering" in the journal Physical Review B, highlighting how changing magnetic fields over time can create quantum states that do not exist in any stationary material (remaining in the same state as time elapses).

"On a big-picture level, I would describe this as an advance in our understanding of how time-dependent control can create and organize new forms of quantum matter," Powell said. "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. In our case, we show that periodically changing a magnetic field can produce driven quantum phases with no static counterpart."

By engineering new quantum behaviors by timing the field, physicists can potentially create technologies that are very stable and hard to disrupt by "noise" or imperfections that can interfere with quantum technology functionality and avoid system errors.

Admittedly, Powell said that it's difficult to describe the technical aspects of the study to non-physicists. But conceptually, research points to possible routes for engineering these kinds of exotic-driven quantum states in controlled platforms such as ultracold-atom experiments.