Since ancient times, mankind has tried to tailor materials by combining different substances. Imagine a world where materials properties could be flexibly changed on demand by simply shining light onto them. A group of physicists from across Europe has now made a decisive step towards this goal by dressing electrons moving in a solid with light.
The team, which includes researchers from the Universities of Regensburg and Marburg, the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and others, observed for the first time how exotic states, known as Floquet bands, arise in a crystal. The discovery, which has been published in Nature, could revolutionize the way we think about material properties.
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