A Breakthrough in Quantum Control by One of Our Own, Ms. Tepie Meng, a PhD Candidate in the Physics Department at Harvard University!

Tepie Meng’s work demonstrates a breakthrough in the coherent control of strongly correlated quantum matter by applying Floquet engineering to manipulate Hubbard excitons in the one-dimensional Mott insulator Sr₂CuO₃. By dressing excitonic states with intense, non-resonant midinfrared pulses, her team achieved controlled Rabi-like rotations of a many-body wavefunction, effectively treating near-degenerate even- and odd-parity exciton states as a quantum two-level system under ultrastrong coupling. Using resonant third-harmonic generation, they directly tracked these rotations on a Bloch sphere, observed dynamical renormalization of the harmonic response as the exciton rotated into dark states, and identified Floquet sidebands—clear signatures of coherent periodic driving. The study establishes a new regime where wavefunction mixing dominates in a complex correlated material, enabling arbitrary-angle control up to and beyond π/2, and lays the foundation for programmable quantum control of solids, exciton-based technologies, and highly sensitive quantum sensing platforms.

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