Japan Is Quietly Winning the Twistronics Race

The angle that rewrote physics — and the country racing to weaponize it

Stack two sheets of graphene, rotate one by roughly 1.1 degrees, chill the result to near absolute zero, and the material does the impossible: it conducts electricity with zero resistance. A superconductor. Or, if you shift the angle slightly, it becomes an insulator. The same atoms. The same process. A different outcome determined entirely by geometry.

This is the “magic angle” discovery that made headlines when MIT’s Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and his team published two papers in 2018. The work earned a Nobel Prize. The phrase “twistronics” — a portmanteau of twist and electronics — entered every physics journal. Western outlets ran the stories. The narrative was clean, dramatic, and almost entirely American-origin.

But read the Asahi Shimbun’s recent report from the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), and a different picture emerges. Japan is not standing still. It is racing through the implications of twistronics in ways that have not made it into English-language coverage.

What the Nobel story leaves out

The Jarillo-Herrero papers showed that twisting changes everything. That insight alone transformed condensed-matter physics. Before 2018, materials scientists controlled properties through composition — what atoms you combine, what crystal structure you grow. Twistronics added a new knob: the angle between layers.

That single variable exploded the design space. Instead of searching through combinations of elements, researchers can now stack atomically thin sheets — graphene, boron nitride, transition metal dichalcogenides — and tune their behavior by rotation. The OpenAlex database shows more than 12,000 cumulative citations for the original papers and 200 to 500 related papers published every year since 2019. The field is moving fast.

But here is what the Nobel celebration does not emphasize: the Nobel recognized a discovery. The harder work — scaling it, understanding it across materials, building devices from it — is happening elsewhere. And a lot of that elsewhere is Japan.

NIMS and the angle of attack

At NIMS, researcher Takuya Iwasaki demonstrates the phenomenon with physical models. Two hexagonal lattices, shifted and overlaid, produce the characteristic moiré interference pattern — the same wave-like visual you see when you photograph a screen with your phone camera. Only here, the scale is sub-nanometer and the consequences are physical, not optical.

“By choosing what to stack and at what angle, you can generate properties that were impossible to predict from the original materials,” Iwasaki explained. “The combinations are essentially infinite. Everyone is searching for what you can find and what you can build.”

That framing matters. It signals a shift from discovery-phase excitement to engineering-phase ambition. The magic-angle graphene experiment proved a principle. The next question — and the one Iwasaki and his colleagues are pursuing — is what happens when you apply that principle systematically across dozens of material combinations, under different conditions, with an eye toward real devices.

Japan has structural advantages in this phase. NIMS is one of the world’s largest materials research institutions, with decades of expertise in synthesizing and characterizing thin films and layered structures. The country’s government has long prioritized materials science through programs like the CREST initiative and the recently expanded Strategic Innovation Creation Program. The funding trajectory favors systematic exploration over single-breakthrough storytelling.

Why Western desks are missing this

English-language science coverage tends to chase Nobel-caliber moments. A single paper from a single lab, announced at a prestigious university, generates the narrative arc that wire services and magazines need. Twistronics fit that mold perfectly in 2018: MIT, two papers, a dramatic physical effect, a Nobel trajectory.

But the follow-through is messier. It involves years of incremental work across multiple institutions, materials, and fabrication techniques. It does not produce a single headline moment. It produces a pipeline.

Japanese science reporting operates differently. Asahi’s article, typically behind a paywall, treats the NIMS work not as a standalone breakthrough but as a chapter in an ongoing national effort. The tone is matter-of-fact. There is no breathless announcement — just a researcher showing a model, a citation count, a list of expanding possibilities. That understatement is itself a signal. It suggests confidence that the work will speak for itself through output rather than press releases.

Western coverage of Japanese science often arrives only after the results have boiled over into high-impact journals or international collaborations. By then, the story has already been told through a different lens. The initial momentum — the institutional strategy, the funding decisions, the talent pipeline — is invisible to outside readers.

What changes next

The moiré physics revolution is still in its adolescence. Magic-angle graphene requires near-absolute-zero temperatures and pristine laboratory conditions. It is not a product. It is a proof of concept that changed how physicists think about materials.

The next milestone will be raising the operating temperature. Superconductivity at 1.1 degrees above absolute zero is remarkable. Superconductivity at anything approaching room temperature would be transformative. Several groups, including some in Japan, are already exploring whether different material combinations or different twist angles might push that boundary higher.

Beyond superconductivity, the implications stretch into electronics, photonics, and quantum computing. A material whose conductivity can be toggled by angle — without changing its chemistry — opens pathways to reconfigurable circuits and novel device architectures that do not exist today.

The race is no longer about who discovers the magic angle. That ship has sailed. The race is about who can engineer the most useful properties out of the infinite combination space that twistronics has opened.

Japan is running that race with institutional depth and quiet intensity. The English-language world may not notice until the results land — and by then, the narrative will have already shifted again.

The broader lesson

Science diplomacy usually focuses on competition over semiconductors or AI. But there is a quieter competition happening in materials laboratories, and it could prove just as consequential. The country that turns twistronics from a physics curiosity into a manufacturing capability will control a fundamental layer of next-generation technology — the ability to program matter itself through geometry rather than chemistry.

The magic angle was discovered in America. The work of making it matter is spreading everywhere else.