News

Chunyu (Mark) Guo, group leader in the Microstructured Quantum Matter Department at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), has been awarded the 2026 Nicholas Kurti Science Prize by Quantum Design Oxford. The European prize recognises outstanding early-career scientists whose research relies on low temperatures and high magnetic fields. It honours Guo's work on kagome metals, where his team showed that electrons can interfere as a collective rather than one by one.

Two back-to-back papers just published in Science map nearly 9,000 atomically thin structures and identify more than 1,600 candidates for new quantum simulators. MPSD Directors Angel Rubio, Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak are among the co-authors of the second paper, a database of materials suited to twisting. This will allow systematic studies of materials in the quantum materials research field, in which the MPSD and its researchers play a key role.
 

Twisting two sheets of 2D materials against each other creates so-called moiré patterns, and with them physical properties that the constituents lack. Understanding these properties requires quantum-mechanical simulation, which is extremely costly at moiré length scales. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of York propose a machine learning framework that predicts the electronic structure of large twisted bilayers with first-principles accuracy. It captures extreme band-structure changes and ferroelectricity 10–100 times faster than direct density functional theory. The paper was recently published in the inaugural issue of PRX Intelligence.
 

Superconductors can carry electrical current without resistance, but only up to a maximum value known as the critical current. The critical current is a crucial figure of merit for applications, and materials science has been long focused on increasing this limit. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have now shown that, in type-II superconductors, this conventional limit can be exceeded when the current is applied for only a few picoseconds. On these ultrashort timescales, the researchers were able to access a much higher, intrinsic limit known as the depairing current. The work has now been published in Nature Physics.