- Letter
Perturbative sensing of nanoscale quantum materials with millimeter-wave photonic crystals
Phys. Rev. Applied 26, L031001 – Published 1 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bl8b-7yqv
Abstract
We introduce all-dielectric millimeter-wave silicon photonic crystal cavities as chip-scale perturbative sensors in small quantum-material samples. By avoiding superconducting elements, the all-silicon geometry is naturally compatible with cryogenic temperatures and strong magnetic fields, opening a route to measurements in regimes where superconducting microwave cavities lose performance. We characterize a bare cavity over the 4.3–294 K range, with the fundamental mode reaching a total quality factor exceeding at 4.3 K in the W-band. As a room-temperature proof of concept, we position a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN)-capped multilayer-graphene (Si/MLG/hBN) heterostructure at an electric-field antinode and measure the perturbative response. From the resulting internal-linewidth shift, we extract a volume-weighted in-plane conductivity . The platform extends naturally to multimode spectroscopy via the cavity’s higher-order modes and to terahertz frequencies by scaling the geometry.