Modified Moire Materials: Beyond Twist and Periodicity

Nontechnical Description Modern technologies control and process information with smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient devices. This project explores a new approach to design materials that manipulate light in ways not possible with existing methods. Moiré patterns can form when two regular patterns overlap with a small twist or slight mismatch. In photonics, that twist changes how light waves move through a material. This project builds on that idea and goes further. It adds carefully engineered variations to these patterns. These novel structures create new opportunities to guide, store, and process light on a microchip. The resulting design principles advance photonic materials and could improve communications, computing, and quantum technologies. The project also supports the education and training of students in advanced manufacturing, computational design, and photonics. Project concepts are incorporated into university courses and public outreach to broaden awareness of modern science and engineering. Technical Description The scientific problem addressed by this project is how structural modifications beyond twist and periodicity alter the effective optical potentials that govern wave localization, resonance formation, and light transport in moiré systems. The research establishes a parameterized framework for engineering one- and two-dimensional modified moiré materials and investigates how amplitude modulation, chirping, symmetry breaking, chirality, and Boolean lattice operations reshape optical behavior. Three integrated research thrusts are pursued in chip-scale photonic systems. The first develops design principles for engineering effective optical potentials in modified moiré structures. The second demonstrates devices including high-quality-factor moiré cavities and a hybrid-mode resonator that couples distinct optical modes to create new opportunities for mode-selective interactions and near-field chirality. The third develops fabrication-aware inverse-design approaches that produce structures that are either robust to manufacturing variation or intentionally sensitive to disorder for applications in hardware security, compact spectroscopy, and reservoir-inspired optical computing. By combining physically interpretable design methodologies with experimental device demonstrations, the project establishes foundational principles for wave manipulation in modified moiré materials and provides broadly applicable insights for photonics, condensed matter systems, acoustics, and mechanics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.