The 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience recognizes Eva Y. Andrei, Allan H. MacDonald and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero for their pioneering work that established the field of twistronics. It is a fitting moment not only to celebrate these remarkable contributions, but also to reflect on how a simple idea changed nanoscience: rotate one atomically thin crystal with respect to another, and a new material is born.
Unlike several of previous years’ prizes that have recognized methodological advances, this year’s prize “wants to acknowledge a simple and universal nanoscale approach to achieve new materials properties”, says Mari-Ann Einarsrud, professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology and chair of the selection committee.
Twistronics has had a remarkably broad impact in nanomaterials science. In twisted bilayer graphene, a small change in angle can generate moiré patterns that reshape the electronic density of states and, at the magic angle (1.1°), produce nearly flat bands where electronic interactions dominate. The discovery of correlated insulating states and superconductivity in magic-angle graphene transformed twistronics from an elegant band-engineering concept into a highly tunable platform for quantum matter1,2. It changed the way researchers thought about the origin of complex quantum phenomena. Suddenly, strong correlations, topology and superconductivity were no longer tied to compositionally complicated materials; rather, these properties could be generated in a single-element material, stacking and twisting layers.
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