Jinyoung Kim

Layered cuprate crystals resemble a stack of pancakes: each pancake is a plane of copper and oxygen atoms, with spacer layers of other elements in between. Usually, superconductivity is studied in the whole stack, where layers influence each other.

Dark matter doesn't emit or reflect light, but its presence is revealed through gravitational effects. To catch even a single particle, physicists build detectors that are like very quiet rooms: inside lie crystals that flash when a particle hits them. But the flash is faint, and if light is lost along the way, the signal can be missed.