Quantum computing has long promised to revolutionize everything from cryptography to drug discovery, but turning the underlying physics into practical, working technology has remained a stubborn challenge. A key piece of that puzzle involves quantum emitters — microscopic sources of quantum light that could serve as fundamental building blocks for quantum computers, secure communications systems, and ultra-precise sensors.
Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney just found a remarkably simple way to gain far more control over these emitters than scientists previously thought possible. The method? Twisting.
What Are Quantum Emitters, And Why Do They Matter?
Quantum emitters are tiny defects or structures within certain materials that can produce individual photons — single particles of light — with quantum mechanical properties. These single-photon sources are essential building blocks for several emerging quantum technologies, because they can carry and transmit quantum information in ways that classical light sources cannot.
The problem has always been control. Scientists have been able to detect and study these quantum emitters in various materials, but reliably tuning their properties — adjusting the color, wavelength, or behavior of the light they emit — has proven genuinely difficult using conventional approaches.
“You can measure these quantum emitters and see that they exist, but it’s hard to make them work in practice,” explained lead author Dr. Angus Gale. “This gives us a lever to get closer to that — a step towards the realization of quantum technologies.”
The Material That Changed Everything: Hexagonal Boron Nitride
The breakthrough centers on a material called hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN — an atomically thin, layered material that has attracted growing attention in quantum research circles over recent years.
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What makes hBN special is its physical structure. Unlike rigid, solid-state quantum materials such as diamond or silicon carbide, hBN exists as stackable, separable layers — similar in structure to graphite, but with distinctly different electronic and optical properties.
Gale offered a vivid analogy to explain why this layered structure matters so much. “With a block of cheese, you can’t really get to the flavor in the middle. But with slices, you can peel away layers, put them back together and change how they interact,” he said.
Because hBN is made of these extremely thin, separable layers, researchers can physically lift them apart, rotate them relative to each other, and restack them — manipulating the material’s properties in ways that simply aren’t possible with conventional solid-block quantum materials.
What Twisting Actually Does
In their experiments, Gale and his research team discovered that twisting the layered material could significantly alter both the color and wavelength of light emitted by the quantum emitters embedded within it.
What surprised the researchers most was the magnitude of this effect. Most previous studies in this field have built devices at a single, fixed twist angle and left them unchanged — essentially locking in one set of properties from the start. This team did something different: they repeatedly lifted, rotated, and restacked the material, continuously modifying its optical properties through an iterative, hands-on process.
“We’re leveraging the fact that this material, hexagonal boron nitride, is layered,” Gale explained. “We can pick it up, stack it, twist it, and use that twist to modify the emitters. You can’t really do that with traditional materials like diamond or silicon carbide.”
The resulting shift in emitted light was considerably larger than researchers typically see when attempting to control quantum emitter properties through other methods. “Often when you control these systems, the amount of manipulation is very limited, but in this case the shift was much larger than expected,” Gale said. “Rather than trying to make hBN defects behave like a traditional solid-state host, we took advantage of hBN’s own strength: its thin, layered, twistable structure.”
Why Twisted Layers Create Entirely New Physics
Supervising author Professor Igor Aharonovich emphasized why this twisting approach is scientifically significant beyond just this specific result.
“You can take two layers that don’t do much on their own, put them together at a specific angle, and suddenly you have a completely different system,” Aharonovich said. This phenomenon — where stacking and twisting atomically thin materials produces entirely new physical behaviors not present in either layer individually — has become one of the most exciting frontiers in condensed matter physics over the past several years, often referred to broadly as “twistronics.”
What This Could Mean For The Future
According to Aharonovich, the implications of this research extend across several emerging quantum technology sectors.
“These materials could eventually be used for quantum computing, communications and quantum sensing, which would help for applications such as healthcare, cybersecurity and improved GPS, and gives us more control over the building blocks needed to get there,” he said.
Quantum computing promises to eventually solve certain categories of problems — drug discovery simulations, complex optimization challenges, advanced cryptography — that remain practically impossible for classical computers. Quantum communication systems offer theoretically unbreakable encryption based on the fundamental laws of physics rather than computational difficulty. Quantum sensors could enable medical imaging, navigation systems, and scientific instruments with sensitivity far beyond what’s currently achievable.
All of these applications depend on having reliable, controllable building blocks — and a simple, repeatable, mechanical method for tuning quantum emitter properties represents a genuinely practical step toward making those building blocks more accessible and adaptable.
The Bigger Picture
This research is a reminder that some of the most significant advances in cutting-edge physics don’t always require exotic new materials or impossibly complex engineering. Sometimes, understanding and creatively exploiting the natural structure of an existing material — layers that can be peeled apart and twisted like slices of cheese — can unlock capabilities that more rigid, conventional materials simply cannot offer.
For a field that has spent years searching for practical ways to bridge the gap between quantum theory and quantum technology, a simple twist might be exactly the kind of unglamorous, elegant solution that moves the needle forward. ⚛️🔬
Source: University of Technology Sydney / Science Advances — June 20, 2026
Journal Reference: Angus Gale, Seungjun Lee, Seungmin Park, Evan Williams, Helen Zhi Jie Zeng, James Liddle-Wesolowski, Young Duck Kim, Milos Toth, Tony Low, Igor Aharonovich. Twist-controlled modulation of quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride. Science Advances, 2026; 12 (25).
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aec0101
