About

Junichiro Kono is the Karl F. Hasselmann Chair in Engineering and a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University. He also serves as the Director of the Smalley-Curl Institute and holds professorships in the Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Materials Science & NanoEngineering. His multidisciplinary appointments reflect a broad research focus that spans electrical engineering, physics, materials science, and nanotechnology. The Kono Lab website lists a diverse group of researchers, including postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and visiting scholars, indicating an active research group under his leadership. Although the page does not provide a detailed narrative biography or specific research highlights, the affiliations and roles suggest that Professor Kono's work involves advanced studies in engineering and physical sciences, particularly in areas related to nanoengineering and applied physics.

Research topics

• Nanotechnology
• Materials science
• Optoelectronics
• Physics
• Composite material
• Computer Science
• Electrical engineering
• Optics
• Thermodynamics

Selected publications

• Graduate Training in Quantum Information Science and Engineering: Lessons, Challenges, and a Roadmap from the NSF Research Traineeship Programs

  ArXiv.org · 2026-05-08

  articleOpen access

  Since 2019, eighteen NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) awards in quantum information science and engineering (QISE) and adjacent fields have been funded, constituting the largest NSF-coordinated investment in graduate QISE training in the United States. Synthesizing lessons from our programs, we work through the central tensions that every QISE graduate program must negotiate: between depth in a home discipline and breadth across the field, between structured instruction and open-ended experiential and hands-on learning, and between training individual specialists and cultivating teams that collectively cover all areas of QISE. We describe the structural and pedagogical innovations the NRT programs have developed in response, assess what is working and what remains unresolved, and sketch 12 open problems the community will need to address as QISE graduate education scales beyond the well-resourced research universities where it has up till now been mainly concentrated. Eight concrete recommendations follow: (1) adopt the startup model of team-based training as an organizing philosophy; (2) invest immediately in sensing and communication curriculum development; (3) build student agency into program governance, not just activities; (4) establish structural mechanisms for industrial engagement rather than depending on goodwill; (5) design for sustainability from year one; (6) develop graduate-level textbooks spanning all three QISE pillars: computing, sensing, and communications; (7) establish shared outcome assessment instruments across programs; and (8) develop structured mechanisms for faculty professional development in QISE.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Magnetic field-induced momentum-dependent symmetry breaking in a kagome superconductor

  Nature Physics · 2026-03-11

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Graduate Training in Quantum Information Science and Engineering: Lessons, Challenges, and a Roadmap from the NSF Research Traineeship Programs

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-05-08

  preprintOpen access

  Since 2019, eighteen NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) awards in quantum information science and engineering (QISE) and adjacent fields have been funded, constituting the largest NSF-coordinated investment in graduate QISE training in the United States. Synthesizing lessons from our programs, we work through the central tensions that every QISE graduate program must negotiate: between depth in a home discipline and breadth across the field, between structured instruction and open-ended experiential and hands-on learning, and between training individual specialists and cultivating teams that collectively cover all areas of QISE. We describe the structural and pedagogical innovations the NRT programs have developed in response, assess what is working and what remains unresolved, and sketch 12 open problems the community will need to address as QISE graduate education scales beyond the well-resourced research universities where it has up till now been mainly concentrated. Eight concrete recommendations follow: (1) adopt the startup model of team-based training as an organizing philosophy; (2) invest immediately in sensing and communication curriculum development; (3) build student agency into program governance, not just activities; (4) establish structural mechanisms for industrial engagement rather than depending on goodwill; (5) design for sustainability from year one; (6) develop graduate-level textbooks spanning all three QISE pillars: computing, sensing, and communications; (7) establish shared outcome assessment instruments across programs; and (8) develop structured mechanisms for faculty professional development in QISE.

  PublisherDOI

• Realization of a chiral photonic-crystal cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry

  Nature Communications · 2026-05-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Chiral cavities offer an intriguing way to manipulate material properties by breaking fundamental symmetries. However, only a few chiral cavity implementations exhibiting broken time-reversal symmetry have been demonstrated, with most relying on either strong magnetic fields, circularly polarized Floquet driving, or ultrastrong coupling between cavity modes and matter excitations. Here, we present a one-dimensional terahertz photonic-crystal cavity that exhibits broken time-reversal symmetry. The cavity consists of a silicon wafer sandwiched between InSb wafers. By exploiting the nonreciprocal terahertz response of a magnetoplasma and the low electron effective mass in InSb, a circularly polarized cavity mode at 0.67 THz under a modest magnetic field of 0.3 T, with a quality factor exceeding 50 is realized. Temperature-, magnetic field-, and polarization-dependent measurements and simulations demonstrate the chiral cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry, providing a robust platform for exploring chiral light–matter interactions and vacuum dressed quantum condensed matter in the terahertz regime. Researchers realized the first truly chiral terahertz cavity with time-reversal-symmetry broken vacuum fields, with near-unity ellipticity at 0.66 THz and Q>50 under a 0.3 T field, offering a robust platform for chiral light–matter interactions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dichotomy of flat bands in the van der Waals ferromagnet <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>Fe</mml:mi> <mml:mn>5</mml:mn> </mml:msub> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>GeTe</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:mrow> </mml:math>

  Physical review. B./Physical review. B · 2026-02-11

  articleOpen access

  Quantum materials with bands of narrow bandwidth near the Fermi level represent a promising platform for exploring a diverse range of fascinating physical phenomena, as the high density of states within the small energy window often enables the emergence of many-body physics. On one hand, flat bands can arise from strong Coulomb interactions that localize atomic orbitals. On the other hand, quantum destructive interference can quench the electronic kinetic energy. Although both have a narrow bandwidth, the two types of flat bands should exhibit very distinct spectral properties arising from their distinctive origins. So far, the two types of flat bands have only been realized in very different material settings and chemical environments, preventing a direct comparison. Here, we report the observation of the two types of flat bands within the same material system--an above-room-temperature van der Waals ferromagnet, Fe$_{5-x}$GeTe$_2$, distinguishable by a switchable iron site order. The contrasting nature of the flat bands is also identified by the remarkably distinctive temperature-evolution of the spectral features, indicating that one arises from electron correlations in the Fe(1) site-disordered phase, while the other geometrical frustration in the Fe(1) site-ordered phase. Our results therefore provide a direct juxtaposition of the distinct formation mechanism of flat bands in quantum materials, and an avenue for understanding the distinctive roles flat bands play in the presence of magnetism, topology, and lattice geometrical frustration, utilizing sublattice ordering as a key control parameter.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chip-Scale Aligned Chiral Carbon Nanotubes Exhibiting Giant Second Harmonic Generation

  ACS Nano · 2026-05-18

  preprintOpen access

  pm/V for a perfectly aligned CNT crystal. Our calculations based on many-body theory correctly estimate the spectrum and magnitude of such excitonically enhanced optical nonlinearity. These results are promising for the development of scalable chiral-CNT electronics and nonlinear photonics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cavity‐mediated coupling between local and nonlocal modes in Landau polaritons

  Nanophotonics · 2025-11-17 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The multimode ultrastrong coupling (USC) regime has emerged as a novel platform for accessing previously inaccessible phenomena in cavity quantum electrodynamics. Of particular interest are cavity-mediated correlations between local and nonlocal excitations, or equivalently, between modes at zero and finite in-plane momentum, which offer new opportunities for controlling light-matter interactions across space. However, direct experimental evidence of such interactions has remained elusive. Here, we demonstrate nonlocal multimode coupling in a Landau polariton system, where cavity photons simultaneously interact with the zero-momentum cyclotron resonance and finite-momentum magnetoplasmons of GaAs two-dimensional electron gas. Our slot cavities, with their subwavelength mode volumes, supply in-plane momentum components that enable the excitation of finite-momentum matter modes. Terahertz time-domain magnetospectroscopy measurements reveal a clear splitting of the upper-polariton branch, arising from hybridization between magnetoplasmon modes and the cavity-cyclotron-resonance hybrids. Extracted coupling strengths confirm USC of the cyclotron resonance and strong coupling of the magnetoplasmon modes to the cavity field, respectively. The experimental results are well captured by the multimode Hopfield model and finite-element simulations. These findings establish a pathway for engineering multimode light-matter interactions involving zero- and finite-momentum matter modes in the USC regime.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lattice-induced spin dynamics in Dirac magnet CoTiO3

  Journal of Applied Physics · 2025-10-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Spin–lattice coupling is crucial for understanding the spin transport and dynamics for spintronics and magnonics applications. Recently, cobalt titanate (CoTiO3), an easy-plane antiferromagnet, has been found to host axial phonons with a large magnetic moment, which may originate from spin–lattice coupling. Here, we investigate the effect of light-driven lattice dynamics on the magnetic properties of CoTiO3 using time-resolved spectroscopy with a terahertz pump and a magneto-optic probe. We found resonantly driven Raman-active phonons, phonon–polariton-induced excitation of the antiferromagnetic magnons, and a slow increase in the polarization rotation of the probe, all indicating symmetry breaking that is not intrinsic to the magnetic space group. The temperature dependence confirmed that the observed spin dynamics is related to the magnetic order, and we suggest surface effects as a possible mechanism. Our results of THz-induced spin–lattice dynamics signify that extrinsic symmetry breaking may contribute strongly and unexpectedly to light-driven phenomena in bulk complex oxides.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ultrahigh-Purity Single-Photon Emission from 2D WSe₂ via Effective Suppression of Classical Emission

  Nano Letters · 2025-07-05 · 3 citations

  article

  Single-photon emitters (SPEs) in two-dimensional WSe2 offer high extraction efficiency and on-chip compatibility, but achieving high purity remains challenging. We present two strategies to suppress classical emission and enhance purity in WSe2-based SPEs. In monolayer WSe2, we exploited the presence and absence of valley–spin locking in free and bound excitons, respectively, to achieve purity of 98.3% via polarization control and 99.0% combined with near-resonant excitation. In bilayer WSe2, we obtained 97.0% purity without polarization filtering, enabled by the indirect band gap and inversion symmetry. These values represent some of the highest as-measured purities reported for 2D TMD SPEs. Our methods do not require complex fabrication or instrumentation and are supported by first-principles calculations of the vacancy state of Se and spin degeneracy. This work offers practical pathways for realizing high-quality single-photon sources for emerging quantum technologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Kramers nodal lines in intercalated TaS2 superconductors

  Nature Communications · 2025-05-29 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Kramers degeneracy is one fundamental embodiment of the quantum mechanical nature of particles with half-integer spin under time reversal symmetry. Under the chiral and noncentrosymmetric achiral crystalline symmetries, Kramers degeneracy emerges respectively as topological quasiparticles of Weyl fermions and Kramers nodal lines (KNLs), anchoring the Berry phase-related physics of electrons. However, an experimental demonstration for ideal KNLs well isolated at the Fermi level is lacking. Here, we establish a class of noncentrosymmetric achiral intercalated transition metal dichalcogenide superconductors with large Ising-type spin-orbit coupling, represented by In x TaS 2 , to host an ideal KNL phase. We provide evidence from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with spin resolution, angle-dependent quantum oscillation measurements, and ab-initio calculations. Our work not only provides a realistic platform for realizing and tuning KNLs in layered materials, but also paves the way for exploring the interplay between KNLs and superconductivity, as well as applications pertaining to spintronics, valleytronics, and nonlinear transport.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative ITR: Optical Control in Semiconductors for Spintronics and Quantum Information Processing

  NSF · $1.1M · 2003–2008

• PIRE: U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research & Education: Ultrafast and Nonlinear Optics in 6.1-Angstrom Semiconductors

  NSF · $2.3M · 2006–2011

• CAREER: Optical Spectroscopy of Quantum Coherence, Correlations, and Many-Body Effects in Nanostructures

  NSF · $463k · 2002–2006

• U.S.-Japan Cooperative Science: Terahertz and Infrared Studies of 6.1-Angstrom Semiconductor Structures

  NSF · $50k · 2002–2006

• Spectroscopy of Semiconductor Nanostructures in High Magnetic Fields

  NSF · $300k · 2010–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Erik H. Hároz

  101 shared

• Robert H. Hauge

  Rice University

  97 shared

• Weilu Gao

  93 shared

• Giti A. Khodaparast

  Virginia Tech

  80 shared

• Jonah Shaver

  64 shared

• Andrey Baydin

  60 shared

• Alexey Belyanin

  59 shared

• Ki‐Ju Yee

  Chungnam National University

  57 shared

Labs

• Kono LabPI

  Not provided

Education

• Ph.D., Physics

  State University of New York Buffalo

  1995

• M.S., Applied Physics

  University of Tokyo

  1992

• B.S., Applied Physics

  University of Tokyo

  1990

Awards & honors

• Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids (2025)
• JSAP International Fellow (2023)
• IOP Fellow (2021)
• SPIE Fellow (2019)
• OSA Fellow (2015)