MIT Scientists Shrink Terahertz Light To Reveal Hidden Quantum “Jiggles”

By squeezing terahertz light beyond its usual limits, researchers have exposed hidden quantum “jiggles” inside a superconducting material.

The kind of light you use can reveal very different things about a material. Visible light mainly shows what is happening at the surface. X-rays can probe structures inside. Infrared light highlights the heat a material gives off.

Researchers at MIT have now turned to terahertz light to uncover quantum vibrations in a superconducting material, signals that scientists have not been able to observe directly until now.

Terahertz radiation sits on the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared. It oscillates more than a trillion times per second, which closely matches the natural vibration rates of atoms and electrons in many solids. That timing makes terahertz light a powerful way to study these motions.

The challenge is that terahertz waves are long, with wavelengths hundreds of microns across. Because light can only be focused to a spot size limited by its wavelength, terahertz beams cannot be squeezed tightly. Even when focused, the beam remains too large for many microscopic samples, so it can pass over tiny features without capturing fine detail.

A Microscope for the Terahertz Regime

In a study published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe a new kind of terahertz microscope that squeezes terahertz radiation into a spot small enough to examine microscopic features. By focusing the light to these tiny dimensions, the instrument can detect quantum-level behavior that previous methods could not reach.

To test the device, the team directed terahertz light into bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, or BSCCO (pronounced “BIS-co”), a superconductor that works at relatively high temperatures. Using the microscope, they detected a frictionless “superfluid” made of superconducting electrons that moved together, oscillating back and forth at terahertz frequencies inside the material.

“This new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before,” says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT.

By using terahertz light to probe BSCCO and other superconductors, scientists can gain a better understanding of properties that could lead to long-coveted room-temperature superconductors. The new microscope can also help to identify materials that emit and receive terahertz radiation. Such materials could be the foundation of future wireless, terahertz-based communications, that could potentially transmit more data at faster rates compared to today’s microwave-based communications.

“There’s a huge push to take Wi-Fi or telecommunications to the next level, to terahertz frequencies,” says Alexander von Hoegen, a postdoc in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and lead author of the study. “If you have a terahertz microscope, you could study how terahertz light interacts with microscopically small devices that could serve as future antennas or receivers.”

In addition to Gedik and von Hoegen, the study’s MIT co-authors include Tommy Tai, Clifford Allington, Matthew Yeung, Jacob Pettine, Alexander Kossak, Byunghun Lee, and Geoffrey Beach, along with collaborators at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Brookhaven National Lab.

Hitting a limit

Terahertz light is a promising yet largely untapped imaging tool. It occupies a unique spectral “sweet spot”: Like microwaves, radio waves, and visible light, terahertz radiation is nonionizing and therefore does not carry enough energy to cause harmful radiation effects, making it safe for use in humans and biological tissues. At the same time, much like X-rays, terahertz waves can penetrate a wide range of materials, including fabric, wood, cardboard, plastic, ceramics, and even thin brick walls.

Owing to these distinctive properties, terahertz light is being actively explored for applications in security screening, medical imaging, and wireless communications. In contrast, far less effort has been devoted to applying terahertz radiation to microscopy and the illumination of microscopic phenomena. The primary reason is a fundamental limitation shared by all forms of light: the diffraction limit, which restricts spatial resolution to roughly the wavelength of the radiation used.

With wavelengths on the order of hundreds of microns, terahertz radiation is far larger than atoms, molecules, and many other microscopic structures. As a result, its ability to directly resolve microscale features is fundamentally constrained.

“Our main motivation is this problem that, you might have a 10-micron sample, but your terahertz light has a 100-micron wavelength, so what you would mostly be measuring is air, or the vacuum around your sample,” von Hoegen explains. “You would be missing all these quantum phases that have characteristic fingerprints in the terahertz regime.”

Zooming in

The team found a way around the terahertz diffraction limit by using spintronic emitters — a recent technology that produces sharp pulses of terahertz light. Spintronic emitters are made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers. When a laser illuminates the multilayered structure, the light triggers a cascade of effects in the electrons within each layer, such that the structure ultimately emits a pulse of energy at terahertz frequencies.

By holding a sample close to the emitter, the team trapped the terahertz light before it had a chance to spread, essentially squeezing it into a space much smaller than its wavelength. In this regime, the light can bypass the diffraction limit to resolve features that were previously too small to see.

The MIT team adapted this technology to observe microscopic, quantum-scale phenomena. For their new study, the team developed a terahertz microscope using spintronic emitters interfaced with a Bragg mirror. This multilayered structure of reflective films successively filters out certain, undesired wavelengths of light while letting through others, protecting the sample from the “harmful” laser which triggers the terahertz emission.

As a demonstration, the team used the new microscope to image a small, atomically thin sample of BSCCO. They placed the sample very close to the terahertz source and imaged it at temperatures close to absolute zero — cold enough for the material to become a superconductor. To create the image, they scanned the laser beam, sending terahertz light through the sample and looking for the specific signatures left by the superconducting electrons.

“We see the terahertz field gets dramatically distorted, with little oscillations following the main pulse,” von Hoegen says. “That tells us that something in the sample is emitting terahertz light, after it got kicked by our initial terahertz pulse.”

With further analysis, the team concluded that the terahertz microscope was observing the natural, collective terahertz oscillations of superconducting electrons within the material.

“It’s this superconducting gel that we’re sort of seeing jiggle,” von Hoegen says.

This jiggling superfluid was expected, but never directly visualized until now. The team is now applying the microscope to other two-dimensional materials, where they hope to capture more terahertz phenomena.

“There are a lot of the fundamental excitations, like lattice vibrations and magnetic processes, and all these collective modes that happen at terahertz frequencies,” von Hoegen says. “We can now resonantly zoom in on these interesting physics with our terahertz microscope.”

Reference: “Imaging a terahertz superfluid plasmon in a two-dimensional superconductor” by A. von Hoegen, T. Tai, C. J. Allington, M. Yeung, J. Pettine, M. H. Michael, E. Viñas Boström, X. Cui, K. Torres, A. E. Kossak, B. Lee, G. S. D. Beach, G. D. Gu, A. Rubio, P. Kim and N. Gedik, 4 February 2026, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-10082-2

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

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