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Although timekeeping has undergone many iterations, the central idea has remained unchanged: to define time by the regularity of periodic events. Long before the advent of modern physics, civilizations relied on the regular motion of Earth and other celestial bodies to organize agriculture, trade, navigation, and daily life. A clock works by measuring time through the number of cycles of its oscillator, meaning that the frequency of the oscillator defines a fundamental limit on the resolution of a time span — the higher the oscillation frequency, the finer the resolution of a second. The history of timekeeping can therefore be understood, in part, as the search for oscillators of ever higher frequency and greater stability. As...

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have engineered new optical coatings for LIGO, the global collaboration hunting gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars.

Physicists have used radioactive lutetium to create what they say is the most accurate atomic clock ever, keeping time perfectly up to 19 decimal places.

The most comprehensive catalogue of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy,

The Quantum Fringe filled the summer with inspiring events for students, scientists and the general public, and also celebrated the third anniversary of Edinburgh's Quantum Software Lab The post Festival season finds Quantum Software Lab in high spirits appeared first on Physics World.

In the conventional diagram of an atom, the center depicts a nucleus—a spherical cluster of protons and neutrons. But that sphere is a simplification: nuclei can deform into exotic shapes that appear more like a pear, football or Frisbee. Understanding why and when nuclei distort is crucial for predicting and modeling how they will behave.

Cosmic detectives are being called on for an interstellar mission to hunt down thousands of invisible black holes lurking in our own backyard. Space scientists from the University of Southampton need amateur astronomers to search for signs that might locate them.

Researchers have experimentally observed energy patterns that physicists have predicted for about 40 years. By arranging laser-trapped atoms into a quantum simulator, they recreated two different quantum tipping points and watched the atoms fall into the exact energy ratios predicted by theory. The technique could now be used to explore mysterious quantum systems where scientists do not already know the answer.

A proposed qubit made with superfluid helium could cut quantum computing error rates by around 100 times by shielding quantum information from common forms of electromagnetic noise. If experiments confirm the predictions, the technology could eventually work alongside today’s superconducting qubits or serve as a new kind of quantum memory.

Maggie Miller explains why our intuition about three dimensions breaks down in four, and how she visualizes 4D spaces as a reel of three-dimensional snapshots. The post What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Quantum technologies rely on qubits, units of information that can exist in combinations of the states 0 and 1 instead of being limited to one or the other like conventional bits. Qubits can become entangled, which means their states become linked in ways that cannot be explained by considering each qubit separately.

Author(s): Ryan WilkinsonPairs of photons provide a gentle way to measure the impact of a molecule’s environment on its ultrafast dynamics. [Physics 19, s117] Published Wed Sep 30, 2026

By superimposing two ultrashort laser pulses that converge from different directions, a team of physicists at the University of Oldenburg has succeeded in generating three-dimensional light fields.

Researchers at Tohoku University, in collaboration with the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and the University of Tokyo, have taken an important step toward semiconductor quantum computing using zinc oxide (ZnO).

We make our prize predictions for 2026 The post Is this the year for a Nobel prize in condensed matter, or maybe particle physics? appeared first on Physics World.

Most magnets have two poles: north and south, or positive and negative, in a familiar arrangement called a "dipole." But researchers are increasingly uncovering more complex forms of magnetism.

Powerful jets from supermassive black holes can disturb star-forming gas far beyond a galaxy’s visible edge, leaving a glowing trail hundreds of thousands of light-years long. By keeping this gas hot and preventing it from falling inward, the jets may help determine whether a galaxy keeps forming stars or becomes quiet.

Scientists have developed and experimentally demonstrated a long-sought method for identifying W states, an important form of multi-photon quantum entanglement. The technique could make complex entangled systems much easier to measure, opening new possibilities for quantum teleportation, communication, and computing.

Boats passing over smooth water form a pair of diffusion wakes behind them veering off at a certain angle. Turbulence occurs along the line directly behind the boat, but the two diffusion waves are at a theoretical angle of 19.5° from the same line, for deep, ideally smooth water.

Researchers show that a hallmark excitation of Fractional Quantum Hall states persists in Fractional Chern Insulators The post Graviton modes survive on the lattice appeared first on Physics World.

The largest combined study of Higgs boson production and decay to date using data from the CMS experiment finds no significant deviations from theory The post Most comprehensive study yet of the Higgs boson at CMS appeared first on Physics World.

A mysterious signal from a powerful gamma-ray burst may reveal how exotic particles and altered physics could let extreme radiation cross the universe The post Scientists explain how a 300 TeV photon could reach Earth appeared first on Physics World.

In materials chemistry, identifying common parameters that can organize magnetic ground states across complex intermetallic compounds remains a central challenge. Researchers have long used chemically tunable parameters to control magnetic properties. One is valence-electron concentration, commonly discussed as the electron-per-atom (e/a) ratio. The e/a ratio has been widely used to classify magnetic ground states in metallic systems such as Heusler alloys and approximant crystals.

Author(s): Charles DayA pattern of surface waves bestowed with fivefold symmetry hosts topological structures. [Physics 19, s119] Published Tue Sep 29, 2026

A new way to accurately measure the distance between quasar pairs is showing promise through University of Alberta research.

Disorder, exotic shapes and great uncertainty: while mathematicians understand phenomena in low and high dimensions very well, the 4D world raises many questions

Scientists have confirmed the existence of a predicted room temperature superconductor, while explaining the microscopic mechanism that distinguishes it from a similar one discovered several years ago. The work, published in the journal Physical Review B, offers "a theoretical blueprint for the future design of superior superconductor hydrides" the physicists write.

The black holes at the hearts of galaxies get the credit and/or blame for a lot of things in their hosts. For example, they take the blame for gobbling up star-forming material, effectively "quenching" starbirth in some areas of galaxies. On the bright side, it now turns out that some of them may be commonly participating in the births of stars, too.

A government-funded competition would award prizes for quantum computers that do useful work no supercomputer can touch. The post US Launches $215 Million Race to Build an Error-Corrected Quantum Computer by 2028 appeared first on SingularityHub.

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has shown for the first time that it can detect the faint glow of hydrogen gas from deep in the universe's past using only its own data.

To build the ultrafast computers of the future, scientists are looking beyond the electrical charge of electrons to another property: their spin. While conventional hardware relies on the movement of charge to process data, tapping into this intrinsic quantum property could enable researchers to reinvent how information travels through a circuit.

Quantum batteries are an emerging area of research, with progress coming from theoretical studies and proof-of-principle experiments in small quantum systems. Unlike conventional chemical batteries used in everyday life, they use quantum systems to store and transfer energy. Researchers are exploring them as potential future energy sources for quantum processors and other quantum technologies.

There's big news from the quantum world. A quantum computer has been used in space for the first time. The device was aboard a spacecraft in low Earth orbit and demonstrated technology that could eventually help solve a problem that has been bugging satellites for years.

Both stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes can produce ionized jets streaming from their poles. Stellar-mass black holes consume the material of companion stars, while supermassive black holes rip stars apart in tidal disruption events. Despite these different eating habits, the formation of jets requires similar conditions.

Lithium, magnesium, potassium and many other ions usually occur together in natural and industrial solutions. Separating them from one another is a challenge, for example, in the extraction and processing of raw materials.

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island have seen hints of a phase transition from the early universe

A new graph-theoretic framework provides a unified description of atom-light interactions across regimes ranging from weak to deep-strong coupling.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have shown that magnetic order can survive weak quantum fluctuations in disordered magnets that lack an energy gap. The work establishes robust ferromagnetism in the two-dimensional random-bond quantum Ising model, confirming a longstanding conjecture in quantum statistical mechanics.

From the smallest building blocks of life to prehistoric vomit and a newly discovered amoeba that can really take the heat.

A magneto-optic platform, comprising magnetic waves inside a layered semiconductor, could enable more efficient use of optical signals for quantum networks. The new platform converts microwave signals to optical signals by coupling magnetic wave particles — also known as magnons — with excitons. The work was led by the City College of New York (CCNY) and included researchers from the City University of New York (CUNY) Advanced Science Research Center, Columbia University, the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, the University of Chicago, and RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau. Optical signals are more suitable for carrying information over long-distance networks than microwave signals. However, because many...

Taylor Swift became the first recipient of MTV's Artist Director Honour, while executive producer Bruce Gillmer offered no details about the outside influence behind the new award.

Taylor Swift received MTV's inaugural Artist Director Honor at the 2026 VMAs, recognising 12 directing projects and her expanding influence on music videos and visual storytelling.

When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.

Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This reservoir of raw material stretches 10–20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy.

Electrolysis can reduce CO2 to CO, a raw material for chemical products such as fuels. Within the GreenQUEST project, an international team led by HZB chemist Prashanth Menezes has systematically investigated catalyst layers made of silver nanoparticles, varying both particle size and density.

Scientists recreated a particle-forming process linked to the extreme physics of the early universe using a 13-ion quantum simulator. The breakthrough suggests quantum computers could eventually help researchers investigate how matter formed and evolved after the Big Bang.

Quantum photonics could be a pivotal part of future quantum technology if the right materials can be created, a new review paper has found.

"We think our findings can be useful in better understanding how space travel affects us."

We are continuously sending information to each other, transmitting zeros and ones through a giant network of connected computers and devices. Scientists are now trying to extend this familiar concept of the internet to the quantum realm, looking for an efficient way to exchange quantum rather than classical information: qubits instead of bits. The motivation is not just scientific curiosity. Qubits can be a 0, a 1 or any superposition of the two. They can also become entangled, showing a degree of correlation that is out of reach for classical bits.

Several companies have made significant headway toward nuclear fusion propulsion drives. Is humanity on the brink of a revolution in spaceflight?

The biggest breakthrough in modern theoretical physics is the discovery that gravity can collapse the dimensions of space. Physicists don’t yet understand the implications. The post Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers have shown that exotic quantum particles called non-Abelian anyons can perform the full range of operations needed for universal quantum computing. Using 54 qubits on Quantinuum’s H2 processor, they combined braiding and fusion to unlock capabilities that braiding alone could not provide.

CERN has started replacing some of the Large Hadron Collider’s most important magnets as part of its High-Luminosity upgrade. The new superconducting magnets will produce fields about 40% stronger, allowing particle beams to be squeezed more tightly before they collide. That should create far more collisions for the ATLAS and CMS experiments to analyze, giving physicists a much larger window into the fundamental workings of the universe.

An electron's charge is normally fixed, like a coin you can't break into pieces. But if electrons are cooled close to absolute zero and trapped in a two-dimensional layer under a powerful magnetic field, they organize into a collective state of "quasiparticles" that seem to hold only a fraction of an electron's charge.

Classical computers can temporarily store the information required to perform specific tasks in a short-term memory component known as RAM (random access memory). This component allows computer processors to retrieve information from a chosen location without searching through all stored data.

Photonic Inc. and Microsoft have collaborated to advance quantum resource estimation for future large-scale quantum computing systems. As quantum computing scales beyond a single processor, developers and enterprises need better ways to understand the value and benefits associated with distributed architectures, and advanced error-correction approaches. The companies are working together to help the ecosystem better estimate the resources required to run quantum algorithms, including qubit counts, run time, and overall system overhead. The collaboration builds on the companies’ existing strategic partnership, combining Photonic’s expertise in next generation error correction codes and distributed quantum computing with...

A California judge has indicated he may reduce the $12.9m damages awarded to Maria Avila, who was attacked by a dog at Chris Brown's home in 2020.

Gal Gadot's $1 million Genesis Prize has become part of a $3 million initiative supporting trauma treatment, caregivers and mental health professionals across Israel.

Foundational postulates of the path-integral formulation observed in the lab The post Single photon measurements confirm Richard Feynman’s vision of quantum mechanics appeared first on Physics World.

A new study from a Yale-led research team suggests that some of the most interesting black holes in

A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.

Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational waves in a brief, dying chord, and since 2015, gravitational-wave detectors have been listening. The notes of that chord, which physicists call quasinormal modes, depend only on the black hole's mass and spin and on the law of gravity itself. Change the law, and the chord changes.

Quantum materials do things ordinary materials cannot. They carry current without any loss, or conduct only along their outer edge while the inside insulates. Future quantum computers and quantum sensors will run on materials like these. To improve them, researchers need to see exactly where currents and magnetic fields run at the nanoscale.

Researchers at the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), a center within Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), discovered that atomic-scale steps can guide superconducting vortices in an ultrathin superconductor.

Selecting profitable investments from an increasingly large and constrained pool of assets could become more effective with a hybrid quantum-classical method, according to research in the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology. The work could help solve a major computational problem in modern portfolio management.

Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients. Twisted graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides have already yielded superconductivity and fractional Chern insulators, states with fractionally charged excitations. One of physics' most active frontiers now has a moonshot ambition: to design entirely new forms of quantum matter.

As a star nears the end of its life, it faces two very different fates: It can explode as a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star, or collapse and become a black hole. What determines the outcome remains one of astrophysics' great unanswered questions.

Can a six-dimensional sphere be described using imaginary numbers? For decades, experts puzzled over this question. Now an AI has apparently answered it

Researchers have shown that multiple time crystals inside a semiconductor can synchronize their oscillations, much like pendulum clocks gradually falling into the same rhythm. The coupling is carried by spin-polarized electrons, allowing time crystals separated by up to 40 micrometers to lock to a common frequency. The discovery reveals surprisingly long-range connections between these exotic spin systems and could help researchers develop future spin-based devices.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman renewed his criticism of Donald Trump after the president's UN speech, arguing that his remarks reflected troubling behaviour and could have dangerous political consequences.

Across every cell in the body, molecules are constantly pulling, gripping and releasing under mechanical strain. That force often decides whether a drug sticks to its target, whether a cell holds its shape or whether a disease takes hold.

Japan's new quantum system, Shunkai, uses "optical tweezers" to trap and rearrange atoms, and will be available to researchers working on quantum error correction.

When the universe was still in its infancy—only 500 million years after the Big Bang, or about 3% of its current age—some of the universe's earliest stars and galaxies had already formed. Astronomers have long predicted that much of the gas surrounding these young galaxies must have remained relatively pristine, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, the primordial ingredients available in the newborn cosmos.

A cryostat that can reach temperatures of 4 K and warm back up again within just two hours offers an efficient solution for testing the electronic components needed to build quantum computers The post Faster cryogenics speeds up quantum testing appeared first on Physics World.

Calculations identify complicated consequences of removing a mirror The post What can cutting a photon in half tell us about causality and local equivalence? appeared first on Physics World.

A few days before the Chuseok holiday, a long line of customers stretched past three neighboring stores outside Pungnyeon Tteok, a rice cake shop in Incheon’s Bupyeong Traditional Market earlier this week. They were not waiting for “songpyeon,” the traditional rice cake associated with Chuseok, but for “pizza seolgi,” a fusion rice cake topped with tomato sauce, cheese and pepperoni slices on a base of steamed white rice cake. Despite a limit of four pieces per customer, the line showed no sign of letting up. Pungnyeon Tteok owner Hwang Seong-un, 50, said he has been selling pizza seolgi for about two months, with an average of around 1,000 people visiting daily. He said the rice cakes typically sell out between 5:30 and 6 p.m. That day, ingredients ran out at around 5:40 p.m., prompting the shop to put up a notice saying it had closed for the day. Traditional-market rice cake shops are bustling ahead of Chuseok, thanks in part to the popularity of unusual rice cake varieties such as

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzA hallmark property of unconventional superconductivity has been discovered in a type-I superconductor, whereas it’s normally observed only in type-II materials. [Physics 19, s115] Published Wed Sep 23, 2026

A researcher from Sejong University has used a new theory of gravity proposed by Erik Verlinde to predict the observed central surface density of dark matter. The study was published in Physics of the Dark Universe on Sept. 20.

Scientists have shown that the two exponents (inelastic scattering exponent and dephasing exponent) commonly used to describe electron scattering in graphene do not necessarily follow the same behavior. Using gated epitaxial graphene, a multi-institutional team of researchers independently extracted the two exponents through current-heating measurements and weak-localization analysis. The contrasting gate-voltage dependence provides evidence that energy relaxation and loss of quantum phase coherence can be governed by different microscopic processes.

Take a second and turn it into trillions of moments. Measure each one. That's how precisely an atomic clock at Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) keeps time—and with record-setting accuracy, according to results published in Nature on Sept. 23.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, preceded by decades of breakthroughs in genetics. It eventually gave us a sequence of the human genome. Yet, while the physical rules behind the genome's organization remain an active area of research, many questions are still largely unanswered. Among these is the impact of an omnipresent force influencing life on Earth: gravity.

If you want to understand the origins of black holes, Yale astronomers say, you need to look beyond the centers of galaxies and start searching in the nooks and crannies. That's where you'll find the "wanderers"—black holes whose journeys may tell the story of how the first black holes formed.

A team from SUNY Polytechnic Institute has designed a quantum rule-based simulator known as Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe. The simulator was originally designed to help students learn abstract concepts in quantum mechanics without using matrix algebra, in a game-like environment. It has rules similar to classical tic-tac-toe but incorporates phenomena from quantum mechanics, such as wavefunction collapse, quantum entanglement and quantum superposition. These concepts are also cornerstones of how quantum computers operate.

For the first time, researchers have directly imaged the magnetization dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator—a nanoscale device that converts direct current into tunable microwave signals and is a promising building block for energy-efficient wireless communication and brain-inspired computing.

Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math. The post Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike first appeared on Quanta Magazine