New materials could unlock light-powered computers far faster than today

A better way to build photonic computers

Computers that run on light instead of electricity could be radically faster and more efficient — but first, scientists need to solve a fundamental problem: how to control those light signals without losing them.

Researchers at New York University have just identified a new material called "gyromorphs" that does this better than anything discovered before. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals a structure that sits somewhere between the rigid order of a crystal and the randomness of a liquid — and that hybrid nature is what makes it so effective.

"Gyromorphs are unlike any known structure," says Stefano Martiniani, an assistant professor at NYU and senior author of the study. "Their unique makeup gives rise to better light-blocking materials than is possible with current approaches."

Light-based computing still lives mostly in the lab. The challenge that's held it back is keeping those photons on track as they travel through a chip. Stray light leaking in from any direction can degrade the signal, so you need a material that blocks it completely from every angle. For decades, researchers have tried using quasicrystals — special structures discovered in the 1980s that follow mathematical rules but don't repeat like normal crystals. The problem: they can either block light completely but only from certain directions, or weaken light from all directions without fully stopping it. Neither option works well enough.

The NYU team approached this differently. Instead of searching for a perfect, ordered structure, they developed an algorithm that could design metamaterials — engineered materials whose properties come from their shape, not their chemical makeup — with built-in disorder. What emerged was something unexpected: a pattern that combines features researchers thought were incompatible.

Think of trees in a forest, Martiniani explains. They grow at random positions, but they're usually a certain distance from one another — there's structure within the randomness. Gyromorphs work the same way. They lack the fixed, repeating pattern of a crystal (giving them liquid-like disorder), but when you step back and look at them from a distance, regular patterns emerge. That combination creates light-blocking zones that photons can't penetrate from any direction.

Mathias Casiulis, the paper's lead author, notes that the team started by identifying a structural signature present in all effective light-blocking materials. "We wanted to make this signature as pronounced as possible," he says. "The result was a new class of materials that reconciles seemingly incompatible features."

The discovery doesn't mean photonic computers are arriving next year. The work is foundational — it solves one of the core engineering problems that's been blocking progress. But with a material that can reliably contain light signals without degrading them, the path to building truly fast, efficient light-based systems just became clearer.