UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Yinming Shao, Downsbrough Early Career Professor of Physics at Penn State, will present “Confining light and matter in van der Waals quantum materials” at 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29, in 10 Sparks Building on the University Park campus.
The event is part of the Penn State Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s (MatSE) 590 Seminar series. The talk is free and open to the public.
Quasiparticles, the collective excitations that emerge from many interacting particles, provide a powerful framework for understanding quantum materials. New quantum phenomena often arise when these excitations can be confined or controlled in unconventional ways.
"Our understanding of complex quantum materials is established on the notion of quasiparticles, which includes fermions, bosons and anyons that are the building blocks of future quantum hardware," Shao said.
Shao utilizes several experimental approaches to uncover, understand and ultimately control novel quasiparticles.
“I am interested in the discovery, understanding and control of quasiparticles in layered quantum materials using various optical spectroscopy and nano-imaging tools," he said.
During the seminar, Shao will discuss how van der Waals materials provide unique opportunities for confining and controlling quasiparticles, enabling researchers to uncover new quantum phenomena and engineer novel optical and electronic behaviors. The presentation will highlight several recent discoveries in layered quantum materials, including a previously unidentified optical excitation known as a magnetic surface exciton in chromium sulfur bromide, a layered magnetic semiconductor.
He will also describe research demonstrating how the strong optical anisotropy of chromium sulfur bromide can enable extreme confinement of light through hyperbolic phonon polaritons, as well as new approaches for controlling graphene plasmons using van der Waals ferroelectric materials. Together, these examples illustrate how emerging quantum materials can provide new strategies for manipulating electronic and optical excitations at dimensions far below the wavelength of light.
In 2025, Shao was awarded an Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy and named a Scialog Fellow in Quantum Matter and Information by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Shao’s research has been published in journals including Nature Physics, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances and Nature Communications.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2024, Shao was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University from 2020 to 2024. He started his graduate research in physics at University of California San Diego in 2013, before moving to Columbia University in 2017. He earned a doctoral degree in condensed matter physics at Columbia University in 2020 and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Zhejiang University in China in 2013.
About MatSE 590 Seminar Series
The Fall 2026 MatSE 590 Seminar series offer graduate students, faculty, and the general public a wide range of lectures featuring invited speakers from academia and industry, providing a platform for sharing research, exploring emerging topics and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue in materials science and engineering.
Support for the MatSE 590 Seminar series is made possible through the generous contributions of industry partners through the Friends of MatSE program.
For more information and a list of upcoming speakers, visit the MatSE 590 Seminar website.