Daniel Shaffer

Daniel Shaffer,Director of Strategy and Innovation,Wilson Dow March 5, 2026 Photo: Courtesy of Wilson Dow There’s no easier way to make something seem innovative than adding technology, especially in our current AI craze. Everything from our inboxes to our toothbrushes claims to be better because it’s “smart”—but audiences are telling us they want something simpler: real human connection. When it comes to live events, extra tech can feel like overcooked “AI slop” that’s impersonal and distracting.

Cavity materials are a frontier to investigate the role of light-matter interactions on the properties of electronic phases of matter. In this work, we raise a fundamental question: can nonlocal interactions mediated by cavity photons destabilize a topological electronic phase? We investigate this question by characterizing entanglement, energy spectrum, and correlation functions of the topological Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain interacting with an optical cavity mode.

Motivated by recent observation of the quantum spin Hall effect in monolayer germanene and twisted bilayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), we study the topological phases of moiré twisted bilayers with time-reversal symmetry and spin sz conservation. By using a continuum model description, which can be applied to both germanene and TMD bilayers, we show that at small twist angles the emergent moiré flat bands can be topologically nontrivial due to inversion symmetry breaking.