Off the Wire Press Releases June 12, 2026 — To design the next generation of smaller, more powerful electronic devices, scientists will need to understand better how the materials act at the smallest scales. In moiré superlattices, scientists lay sheets of identical or similar materials just an atom thick atop each other. These materials may promise finely tuned electronic behaviors at tiny distances. But their behavior doesn’t always match with existing theory. A team from Florida State University used PSC’s NSF-funded Bridges-2 to explore how a type of matter on a triangular moiré superlattice behaves, suggesting how scientists can improve their theory and supplying a new tool for materials engineers to use in designing devices. Apple’s M3 Ultra computer chip, which powers the latest iPhones and iMacs, contains 184 billion transistors. The tiny “metal lines” that carry electrons through the device can be as close together as 24 nanometers — about a millionth of an inch. At that scale, the weird rules of quantum mechanics, by which electrons are waves and can jump across otherwise “solid” barriers, take over. As our electronics get smaller, it gets harder to determine how they’ll behave. Knocking together components and seeing what happens isn’t economical or effective. Instead, you first need to figure out how materials work at the most basic level. Such basic science doesn’t always create new devices. But it gives the designers the rules they need to figure new devices out. One set of materials that scientists would like to understand better are moiré superlattices. These materials offer enhanced tunability, because it may be possible to design them to control movement of electrons across their structure — what computer scientists call “gate voltages.” One particular moiré system has two sheets of slightly mismatched materials called transition metal dichalcogenides, each only an