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  • Letter

Perturbative sensing of nanoscale quantum materials with millimeter-wave photonic crystals

Kevin K. S. Multani1,2,3,*, Zhurun Ji1,3,*, Wentao Jiang2, Siyuan Qiu1, Akasha G. Hayden4, Gitanjali Multani2, Sharon R. Platt2, Emilio A. Nanni3, Zhi-Xun Shen1,2 et al.

Amir H. Safavi-Naeini2,†

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: safavi@stanford.edu

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 105 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 σsample≈1×105  S/cm. The platform extends naturally to multimode spectroscopy via the cavity’s higher-order modes and to terahertz frequencies by scaling the geometry.

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