To understand why pairing photons with phonons is such a compelling frontier, it helps to consider what each carrier of energy does best. Photons, the individual quanta of light, are the undisputed champions of communication. They travel at the fastest speed physics allows, they interact only weakly with their surroundings, and they can carry information across intercontinental fiber networks with astonishing fidelity. Phonons, the quantized units of mechanical vibration, are the opposite in temperament. They move slowly, they are easily disturbed by heat, and they almost never travel far in ordinary materials. Yet those same liabilities translate into strengths: phonons can store energy in compact volumes, they couple naturally to nearly every other physical system, and their slow pace gives researchers a handle for manipulating and reading out quantum states that would otherwise be too fleeting to grasp.

The field that exploits this complementarity is known broadly as cavity optomechanics, and its central idea is to place mechanical motion inside an optical resonator so that light can exert exquisitely controlled forces on a vibrating object, while the vibration in turn modulates the light. When the interaction is strong enough, the two systems stop behaving as separate entities and become hybridized, sharing quantum states the way two coupled pendulums share energy. This hybrid regime is where the most exciting applications live. A mechanical oscillator entangled with an optical field could serve as a transducer, converting quantum information from one physical carrier to another. A phonon mode driven by light could act as an extremely narrow filter or delay line for microwave and optical signals. And a massive mechanical object cooled close to its quantum ground state becomes a laboratory for testing whether the strange rules of quantum mechanics survive at scales far larger than atoms.

Renninger’s laboratory has built its reputation on pushing these interactions into new regimes, and the Moore Foundation award will support a program that deliberately spans multiple physical platforms. Rather than confining the work to a single device geometry, the project aims to create light-driven sound devices and measurement methods that operate across integrated photonic chips, surface acoustic wave devices, and bulk crystalline resonators. Each platform occupies a different niche. Chip-scale devices offer tight confinement and strong light-matter interaction, making them ideal for signal processing and integration with existing photonics. Surface acoustic waves, which ripple along the surface of a piezoelectric crystal much like waves across a pond, provide a natural bridge between electrical circuits and mechanical motion, and Rochester researchers have previously explored their potential for future quantum networks. Bulk crystals, meanwhile, can host acoustic modes of exceptional purity, with phonons bouncing back and forth millions of times before dissipating, which is exactly the kind of long-lived storage that quantum technologies demand.

One of the most consequential goals of the program is the generation of strong, narrow-band acoustic responses for optical signal processing. Modern communication systems are straining under demand for bandwidth, and the ability to filter, route, and delay light using sound offers a route to processors that combine the speed of photonics with the selectivity of acoustics. Because phonons oscillate at frequencies many orders of magnitude below those of optical carriers, they provide a natural clockwork for manipulating light with fine spectral resolution. A device that converts an optical signal into a phonon, holds it briefly, and converts it back can function as a tunable delay line or a frequency-selective switch, capabilities that underpin everything from coherent communications to quantum information protocols that must synchronize photons arriving from different sources.

A second, more speculative thread reaches into fundamental physics: the search for ultralight dark matter. Cosmological and astrophysical evidence overwhelmingly indicates that most of the matter in the universe is invisible, interacting with ordinary matter only through gravity, yet its identity remains one of the deepest open questions in science. Among the many candidate particles proposed over the decades, ultralight bosons occupy a particularly tantalizing corner of parameter space. If they exist, they could behave less like particles and more like a faint, oscillating classical field that permeates everything, potentially exerting periodic forces on matter at extremely well-defined frequencies. Detecting such signals requires sensors of extraordinary sensitivity to vanishingly weak, narrow-band forces, and precision mechanical resonators coupled to optical readout are among the most promising architectures. Renninger’s project aims to evaluate and extend this sensitivity, potentially giving researchers a new class of instruments for listening to the faintest gravitational whispers of the dark sector.

The program also promises new tools for interrogating the materials themselves. Defects in crystals, atomic-scale imperfections that disrupt an otherwise regular lattice, play a decisive role in semiconductor technology, where they can either ruin a device or, when engineered deliberately, serve as qubits, single-photon sources, or sensors. Mapping where these defects sit, how they lose energy, and how they interact with their surroundings is notoriously difficult. Renninger envisions using light to control and measure mechanical motion as a way to reveal this hidden landscape, essentially turning acoustic and optical probes into microscopes for energy loss and imperfection. Such techniques could benefit the semiconductor industry, where understanding defect behavior is central to manufacturing, as well as the quantum community, where the coherence of spin qubits often hinges on the defect environment.

Perhaps the most conceptually ambitious aim is to build experimental platforms for testing how large mechanical systems behave near the limits of quantum physics. Quantum mechanics was developed to describe atoms and photons, yet there is no agreed-upon reason why it should fail at larger scales, and no consensus on where, if ever, the quantum-to-classical transition occurs. Massive mechanical oscillators, because they couple to so many environmental degrees of freedom, offer a clean testing ground. By cooling such oscillators toward their quantum ground state and then driving them with light, researchers can ask whether superposition and entanglement persist in objects containing trillions of atoms. Renninger’s stated ambition to broaden how researchers use light to control and measure motion in systems that are currently hard to reach speaks directly to this question, extending optomechanical techniques to platforms where they have not previously been practical.

Beyond the technical program, the Moore Foundation’s Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative is structured to amplify individual awards through collective benefit. The 21 new investigators are brought together as a cohort, with support for exchanging ideas, developing new collaborations, and investing in mentoring and professional development. For mid-career scientists, this model of flexible funding is often described as room to take risks, and it reflects a philosophy that the most transformative experiments frequently begin as questions too open-ended to survive a conventional proposal cycle. Renninger expressed gratitude for the foundation’s support of his research program, noting that his lab hopes to produce better tools for optical signal processing, new ways to map hidden defects and energy loss inside materials, and experimental platforms for probing quantum behavior in mechanical systems. The full list of 2026 investigators is available on the Moore Foundation website, and for the field of optomechanics, the award signals that the marriage of light and sound is now regarded as one of experimental physics’ most fertile frontiers.

Subject of Research: Cavity optomechanics: coupling photons and phonons for quantum sensing, signal processing, and fundamental physics

Article Title: Pairing light and sound to explore new frontiers in physics

Article References: Pairing light and sound to explore new frontiers in physics. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: optomechanics, photons, phonons, quantum physics, surface acoustic waves, dark matter, Moore Foundation, University of Rochester, signal processing, crystal defects, quantum sensing, experimental physics

The announcement, made on October 2, 2026, positions Grosso’s laboratory to take on a challenge that sits at the heart of one of the most stubborn obstacles in quantum technology. Quantum devices, from experimental quantum computers to prototype quantum sensors, exploit the strange behavior of matter at extremely small scales, where particles can exist in superpositions of states and become entangled with one another across distances. These behaviors underpin the promise of radically new approaches to computing, communication, and sensing. Yet the same fragility that makes quantum states so powerful also makes them extraordinarily vulnerable. Heat, stray electromagnetic fields, and above all vibrations, the ceaseless microscopic jiggling of atoms within any material, can scramble quantum information in a process known as decoherence. The standard strategy has been isolation: suspend atoms in vacuum, cool systems to near absolute zero, and engineer barriers between the quantum system and its noisy environment.

Grosso’s team intends to flip that logic on its head. Rather than treating localized molecular vibrations embedded within solid materials as noise to be suppressed, the researchers will investigate whether those vibrations can be deliberately built into quantum systems and harnessed as a resource for controlling, transferring, and storing quantum information. In the vocabulary of condensed matter physics, these vibrations are related to phonons, quantized modes of mechanical motion that propagate through crystal lattices. In many quantum platforms, phonons are the enemy, the channel through which energy leaks out of carefully prepared quantum states. Grosso’s program asks whether, under the right conditions and with the right materials, that same channel can be tamed, shaped, and directed, so that mechanical motion becomes an asset rather than a liability.

The experimental focus will fall on a remarkable class of materials known as wide-bandgap nitrides, semiconductors that are already familiar to industry thanks to their role in light-emitting diodes and power electronics. Within these crystals, certain defects, atomic-scale imperfections in the otherwise regular lattice, can behave as highly complex miniature quantum systems. In a single nanostructure, the electronic states of such a defect can interact with light, with electrical charge, and with the molecular vibrations of the surrounding lattice. This intimate coupling of optical, electronic, and mechanical degrees of freedom within one nanoscale object is precisely what makes these defects interesting for Grosso’s purposes: they offer a natural laboratory in which vibrations and quantum information coexist and communicate.

To interrogate these systems, Grosso and his team will deploy advanced laser and spectroscopy techniques capable of studying individual defects one at a time. Single-defect spectroscopy is a demanding craft, requiring the ability to isolate the optical signature of one nanoscale imperfection amid billions of atoms and to track how its quantum states evolve in response to controlled perturbations. By measuring how molecular vibrations interact with the electronic and optical properties of individual defects, the researchers hope to determine whether those vibrations can be precisely controlled. Success would open the door to using vibrations as new handles for manipulating quantum information, potentially reducing errors in quantum operations and encoding more information within a single quantum system than would otherwise be possible.

The choice of wide-bandgap nitrides carries a second, potentially transformative advantage: compatibility with existing semiconductor manufacturing and the possibility of quantum functionality at or near room temperature. Most leading quantum computing platforms today rely on elaborate cryogenic cooling, with dilution refrigerators holding processor chips at temperatures colder than deep space. That infrastructure imposes enormous costs in money, energy, and complexity, and it remains one of the practical barriers separating laboratory demonstrations from widely deployable quantum technologies. If quantum defects in nitride semiconductors can perform useful quantum operations without such cooling, the result could be a dramatic simplification of the hardware required for quantum devices, bringing them closer to real-world applications in sensing, communication, and computation.

Grosso expressed both gratitude and ambition upon receiving the award. “I’m incredibly excited and honored to receive this award,” he said. “It gives our lab the freedom to pursue a new direction and ask a fundamental question about quantum materials: Can we learn to control and turn vibrations that are often viewed as obstacles into something useful? The Moore award will allow us to take risks, develop new experimental capabilities, and follow the science wherever it leads.” That emphasis on risk is not incidental. The Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative was designed specifically to provide sustained, flexible funding to mid-career physicists pursuing ambitious research, giving them the freedom to take scientific risks, develop new approaches, and pursue unexpected findings in ways that conventional grant structures rarely permit.

The program’s reach is now substantial. With nearly 100 investigators at work across the initiative, funded projects span condensed matter physics, fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, quantum information science, soft matter, and atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Theodore Hodapp, program director for the initiative, framed the philosophy behind the program: “With nearly 100 investigators now at work, we are seeing the range of bold, original science we hoped this Initiative would make possible. From the start, our aim has been to accelerate progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving brilliant mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely can. That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways.”

Colleagues at the CUNY ASRC see the award as a validation of the institution’s research culture. Andrea Alù, founding director of the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative and Distinguished Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, praised the originality of the funded work. “Professor Grosso’s award recognizes both the originality of his research and his willingness to challenge conventional thinking,” Alù said. “This is exactly the kind of fundamental, high-risk research that can open entirely new directions in photonics and quantum science, in line with the overarching goals of our Photonics Initiative. We are excited to see where he and his team take this work.” Notably, Grosso is the second researcher from the Photonics Initiative to receive a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator award. Matthew Sfeir, then a professor with the initiative, received the honor in 2023 for research into the infrared and terahertz properties of novel organic materials and their potential use in advanced photonic and quantum technologies.

For Grosso, the award’s flexibility will enable his laboratory to build and carry out first-of-a-kind experiments combining advanced optical and quantum-control techniques to probe quantum systems with unprecedented capabilities. The broader intellectual stakes are considerable: if localized molecular vibrations in solids can indeed be controlled and repurposed, scientists would gain a new set of building blocks for quantum technologies, drawn from a form of motion that generations of researchers have worked diligently to suppress. Whether that vision materializes will depend on years of careful single-defect experiments, but the Moore Foundation’s investment reflects a bet that the boldest questions in experimental physics, the ones that challenge conventional wisdom about what counts as signal and what counts as noise, are precisely the ones worth funding.

Subject of Research: Harnessing localized molecular vibrations in wide-bandgap nitride semiconductor defects as a controllable resource for quantum information technologies

Article Title: Gabriele Grosso named 2026 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator

Article References: Gabriele Grosso named 2026 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Gabriele Grosso, Moore Foundation, Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative, quantum information, phonons, molecular vibrations, wide-bandgap nitrides, semiconductor defects, single-defect spectroscopy, room-temperature quantum systems, CUNY ASRC, photonics

Established in 2000 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has long been a cornerstone of scientific support, particularly in the realms of scientific discovery and environmental conservation. The Experimental Physics Investigators initiative specifically targets mid-career researchers, providing them with the resources to develop their research programs rather than focusing on single, isolated projects. This approach grants scientists the freedom to explore new ideas and adapt their research directions as new data emerges, a flexibility that is often lacking in federal grant systems. By investing in the scientists themselves, the foundation aims to foster an environment where bold, original science can thrive without the pressure of immediate, predefined outcomes.

Crider’s research focuses on some of the most neutron-rich atomic nuclei known to exist, a domain that presents significant challenges for experimental physicists. These exotic nuclei are unstable and decay rapidly, often releasing neutrons in complex patterns that are difficult to observe and measure with current technology. Understanding the decay processes of these nuclei is crucial for advancing nuclear models and improving our knowledge of how heavy elements are formed in the universe. Crider’s work seeks to unravel the intricacies of neutron emission, including the number of neutrons released and their subsequent behavior, which provides critical data for testing theoretical predictions about nuclear structure and stability.

With the support of the Moore Foundation, Crider plans to develop a new compact detector designed to track neutron interactions with unprecedented precision. This detector will address a key limitation in current experimental setups: the difficulty in distinguishing between multiple neutrons and a single neutron that interacts with the detector more than once. By resolving this ambiguity, the new technology will provide a clearer picture of neutron emission and the behavior of these unusual nuclei. The compact design of the detector also offers practical advantages, making it easier to deploy in various experimental environments and potentially allowing for the study of short-lived, rare isotopes that are difficult to produce and observe. This innovation could significantly enhance the capabilities of experimental nuclear physics, enabling researchers to gather more accurate and detailed data from their experiments.

“I’m incredibly honored to receive this award,” Crider said, reflecting on the significance of the recognition. “The ideas behind this project bring together several areas of research I’ve been working toward throughout my career, from neutron detection and nuclear decay to the development of new detector technologies. The Moore Foundation’s support gives us the freedom to bring those ideas together and try something genuinely new. If we succeed, we’ll have a new way to understand how some of the most exotic nuclei in nature decay.” Crider’s enthusiasm underscores the transformative potential of the project, which aims to bridge gaps in current knowledge and open new avenues for exploration in nuclear physics. The award not only validates his past work but also provides the resources necessary to push the field forward in meaningful ways.

Theodore Hodapp, the program director for the Experimental Physics Investigators initiative, emphasized the broader impact of the program on the landscape of experimental physics. “With nearly 100 investigators now at work, we are seeing the range of bold, original science we hoped this initiative would make possible,” Hodapp said. “From the start, our aim has been to accelerate progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving brilliant mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely can. That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways.” Hodapp’s comments highlight the foundation’s commitment to fostering innovation and supporting scientists who are willing to take intellectual risks. The program’s success in attracting a diverse group of researchers demonstrates its effectiveness in promoting original and impactful scientific work.

Crider’s research project is a collaborative effort involving several experts from different institutions. Ron Unz, a health physicist and project manager at Mississippi State University’s Institute for Clean Energy Technology, will assist with the detector development and instrumentation aspects of the project. Unz’s expertise in health physics and project management will be instrumental in ensuring that the detector is built to the highest standards of safety and efficiency. Additionally, Julie Butler, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Mount Union, will provide support for machine learning approaches to help the team understand detector signals. Butler’s work in machine learning will be crucial for processing the complex data generated by the new detector, allowing for more accurate and rapid analysis of neutron interactions. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together diverse skills and perspectives, enhancing the project’s potential for success.

Benjamin Crider joined Mississippi State University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy after earning his doctorate in physics from the University of Kentucky in 2014. His academic journey began with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Richmond in 2006, followed by a master’s degree in physics from the University of Kentucky in 2009. Crider’s extensive educational background and research experience have prepared him to tackle the complex challenges associated with studying neutron-rich nuclei. His selection as a Moore Foundation Investigator is a testament to his dedication and expertise in the field, as well as his ability to contribute to the advancement of nuclear physics. The award will enable him to continue his research and further develop the innovative detector technology that could have far-reaching implications for the study of exotic nuclei.

The development of the new compact detector represents a significant step forward in experimental nuclear physics, offering a more precise and efficient way to study neutron emission. By distinguishing between multiple neutrons and single neutrons that interact multiple times, the detector will provide clearer data on the behavior of neutron-rich nuclei. This improved precision will allow researchers to test nuclear models with greater accuracy and gain a deeper understanding of how heavy elements are formed. The compact design of the detector also makes it more versatile, potentially enabling the study of rare isotopes that are difficult to produce and observe. As Crider and his team work to bring this technology to fruition, the potential for new discoveries in nuclear physics grows, promising to expand our knowledge of the fundamental forces that govern the universe.

The Moore Foundation’s support of Crider’s work exemplifies the value of flexible, long-term funding in driving scientific innovation. By providing researchers with the resources to pursue their ideas without the constraints of traditional grant structures, the foundation enables them to take on risky, high-reward experiments that could lead to breakthrough discoveries. Crider’s project, with its focus on developing a new detector technology, is a prime example of how such support can foster original and impactful science. As the field of experimental physics continues to evolve, initiatives like the Experimental Physics Investigators program will play a crucial role in advancing our understanding of the physical world and paving the way for future innovations. The success of Crider’s project could have far-reaching implications for nuclear physics and beyond, demonstrating the power of flexible funding in driving scientific progress.

Subject of Research: Development of a compact neutron detector for studying neutron-rich atomic nuclei

Article Title: Physicist Ben Crider selected for prestigious $1.35 million Moore Foundation Investigator Award

Article References: Physicist Ben Crider selected for prestigious $1.35 million Moore Foundation Investigator Award. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: nuclear physics, neutron detection, atomic nuclei, experimental physics, Moore Foundation, detector technology, isotope research, nuclear decay, Physicist, Crider, selected, prestigious