We found a bizarre form of light that acts like both a solid and a liquid, and it could make your next computer a thousand times faster.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Ultrafast All-Optical Switching via a Supersolid Phase Transition of Light
arXiv · 2604.09097
The Takeaway
By creating a "supersolid" made of light, researchers built a switch that uses almost zero energy. This could replace traditional electronic switches, making computers run at incredible speeds without overheating.
From the abstract
We propose ultrafast all-optical switching exploiting the bistability between a spatially uniform photon superfluid and a spontaneously ordered supersolid in a driven-dissipative microcavity. The key ingredient is a tunable nonlocal photon--photon interaction engineered by embedding a high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) inside the cavity. A drift current displaces the Fermi disk, imparting a negative region to the Lindhard interaction kernel at finite wavevectors and triggering a r