Twistoptics: Manipulating Light-Matter Interactions at the Nanoscale with Twisted van der Waals Materials

Twistronics is an emerging field exploiting the stacking and twisting of different 2D materials to change their electrical properties. The ambitious European Research Council-funded TWISTOPTICS project will break new ground in the field of ‘twistoptics’, which harnesses stacks of twisted layers of van der Waals materials. These materials have exotic properties including strong in-plane anisotropy or directionally dependent light propagation (not uniform in all directions) that can be steered by stacking and twisting two slabs of a vdW material. The team will develop a technological platform for the active manipulation of nanolight, and use it to design and fabricate functional nanodevices, opening up the field of quantum twistoptics.