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Excited to share our latest preprint, on using deep learning to extract the weird fractional quantum statistics of 2D topological materials: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15872

Fundamental particles are either fermions or bosons. Fermions, like electrons, make up matter, while bosons, like photons, are force carriers. But in two dimensional materials in a magnetic field, things can start to get weird...

The collective excitations of many electrons behave a lot like particles...but instead of particles with integer spin (bosons) or half-integer spins (fermions) they behave like they have weird fractional spins like 1/3, 1/5, etc. This is the *fractional quantum hall effect*.

This behavior was so weird and unexpected that it ended up being the subject of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics. No one even knew how to write down a wavefunction that explained this phenomenon until Bob Laughlin just dreamed one up one day. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

Rather than write down a solution through a stroke of genius, we trained a Transformer-like neural network to calculate these fractional spin statistics using "entanglement interferometry", and got answers more accurate than the Laughlin wavefunction.

All-around fantastic work from Andres Perez Fadon and collaborators, and this shows how these calculations could be done for systems where we still don't know how to write down even qualitatively correct solutions.