September 28, 2026 -- Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients. Twisted graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides have already yielded superconductivity and fractional Chern insulators, states with fractionally charged excitations. One of physics’ most active frontiers now has a moon shot ambition: to design entirely new forms of quantum matter.

New families of twisted materials have repeatedly brought new rules for how electrons move and interact — a different Hamiltonian — and new kinds of quantum simulators. A research team’s recent Nature study of M-point twisting illustrates how changing the starting electronic structure opens different physics. Exploring other atomic architectures could therefore uncover quantum states and models that today’s familiar platforms cannot reach.

Now, in two back-to-back papers published in Science Sept. 24, an international collaboration provides both the building blocks and a guide to that vast search. The first maps the electronic structures and topology of nearly 9,000 two-dimensional entries, whether topological or not. The second identifies more than 1,600 candidates for twisting, with different electronic starting points that could enable entirely new kinds of quantum simulators.

“Every new family of twisted materials gives us a chance to ask a different question about quantum matter. We want to move beyond the few platforms we know and explore the enormous range of physics that other layers and other twists could make possible,” said B. Andrei Bernevig, a Princeton University professor of physics and co-author of both studies.

Each candidate for twisting was a crystal that had to be grown in its bulk compounds.

“Each compound asks for its own growth conditions, so we work through them one at a time. That is how a list of candidates becomes samples other groups can measure,” said Emilia Morosan, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and co-author on the second paper.