Emory physicists predict that light could reveal the location of elusive fractional-charge quasiparticles, offering a possible tool for research on more resilient quantum computing.
A flash of light may one day help physicists find particles that are not really particles at all. Researchers at Emory University have modeled how light could reveal the presence and location of anyons: unusual, fractionally charged excitations that emerge from the collective motion of electrons in certain materials.
The work, led by Emory physicist Luiz Santos and graduate researcher Tianhong Lu, proposes an optical signature for an anyon in a specialized two-dimensional material. It is a theoretical result, not a demonstrated detector. The predicted signal now awaits experimental confirmation.
The team focused on twisted-bilayer molybdenum ditelluride, or MoTe₂, a material that can host a fractional Chern insulator. In such a system, the coordinated behavior of electrons produces excitations with fractional electric charge. The researchers modeled the material alongside a nearby semiconductor layer that hosts mobile excitons—neutral, light-sensitive combinations of an electron and a positively charged hole.
Their calculations suggest that an exciton can bind to an anyon, specifically a quasihole carrying about one-third of an electron’s charge. The resulting composite state would alter the light emitted by the exciton. In particular, the researchers predict a redshift in its photoluminescence: the emitted light would have slightly lower energy than expected. The modeled binding grows stronger when the layers are closer together and excitons are less mobile, and fades toward zero at separations around 10 nanometers.
That shift could offer a way to infer that an anyon is nearby. “Using a particular frequency of light, we’ve developed a sensor that can pinpoint the location of an anyon in a material,” Santos said in Emory’s account of the research. The “sensor,” for now, is a prediction based on modeling, simulation and analysis—not a working device that has located an anyon in a laboratory.
Anyons first emerged as a surprising possibility in studies of the fractional quantum Hall effect. In that setting, a two-dimensional electron system is cooled to extremely low temperatures and placed in a strong magnetic field. Its collective excitations can behave as if they carry only a fraction of an electron’s charge. More recently, researchers have studied related fractional states in moiré materials, where the alignment of atomically thin layers creates new patterns of electronic behavior, sometimes without the same strong magnetic fields.
The proposed MoTe₂ platform is not a conventional fractional quantum Hall system. That distinction matters: the researchers are exploring whether light can probe fractionalized excitations in a different kind of material, not claiming to have directly observed the optical effect in the lab. The study builds on a growing experimental context, including 2026 Nature research cited by the authors that reported photoluminescence signatures associated with anyons and trions in moiré fractional Chern insulators. That work does not, however, validate the specific Emory proposal.
Why seek anyons? Their behavior may make them less vulnerable than ordinary quantum states to environmental disturbances, a persistent obstacle for quantum computing. A particular class of anyons could, in principle, support topological quantum computation, in which information is encoded in a system’s global properties rather than in fragile local details. Lu described that as a long-term goal, not an immediate application.
The next step is experimental: researchers will need to build the proposed material system, illuminate it and determine whether the predicted redshift appears and tracks an anyon. The Emory team’s work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Until experiments test the signal, the finding is best understood as a possible new way to study anyons—not a new quantum-computing capability already in hand.
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