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Team in China sends data with entangled atoms, neutralizing backdoor hardware threats

In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a "quasi-extremal primordial black hole," explodes.

Recently, a research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences successfully grew a high-entropy garnet-structured oxide crystal and achieved enhanced laser performance at the 2.8 μm wavelength band. By introducing a high-entropy design into a garnet crystal system, the team obtained a wide emission band near 2.8 μm and continuous-wave laser output with improved average power and beam quality, demonstrating the material's strong potential as a high-performance gain medium for mid-infrared ultrashort-pulse lasers.

Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its centre but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence.

Scientists say a jet from a previously studied supermassive black hole has grown brighter, becoming one of the most energetic events in the universe.

Cosmic rays are extremely fast, charged particles that travel through space at nearly the speed of light. The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It is the second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed, carrying around 40 million times more energy than particles accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider. Such particles are exceedingly rare and thought to originate in some of the most extreme environments in the universe.

Researchers have found what might be a little red dot transitioning into its final state, where x-rays burst through its gas cocoon. Others argue the object is nothing special

An experiment with superconducting qubits opens the door to determining whether quantum devices could be less energetically costly if they are powered by quantum batteries

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There is a lot we have yet to understand about the center of the Milky Way—could it be due to a mass of invisible dark matter?

Quantum computers hold great promise for exciting applications in the future, but for now they keep presenting physicists and engineers with a series of challenges and conundrums. One of them relates to decoherence and the errors that result from it: bit flips and phase flips. Such errors mean that the logical unit of a quantum computer, the qubit, can suddenly and unpredictably change its state from "0" to "1," or that the relative phase of a superposition state can jump from positive to negative.

Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its center but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence, astronomers say. They believe this invisible substance—which makes up most of the universe's mass—can explain both the violent dance of stars just light-hours (often used to measure distances within our own solar system) away from the galactic center and the gentle, large-scale rotation of the entire matter in the outskirts of the Milky Way.

Global climate models capture many of the processes that shape Earth's weather and climate. Based on physics, chemistry, fluid motion and observed data, hundreds of these models agree that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to hotter global temperatures and more extreme weather. Still, uncertainty remains around how seasonal weather patterns and atmospheric systems like the jet stream will respond to global warming. Some of this uncertainty stems from the way models approximate the effects of relatively short-lived, small-scale phenomena known as gravity waves.

Favoring light emission instead of heat dissipation after light absorption.

Astronomers used James Webb Space Telescope data to determine the density of the universe's most mysterious "stuff."

Researchers of the University of Stuttgart and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Wu¨rzburg, led by professor Stefanie Barz at the University of Stuttgart, have demonstrated a source of single photons that combines on-demand operation with record-high photon quality in the telecommunications C-band — a key step toward scalable photonic quantum computation and quantum communication. According to Barz, the lack of a high-quality on-demand C-band photon source has served as a bottleneck of quantum optics for more than a decade. The current work removes that obstacle, she said. Quantum particles such as photons that are identical in all their properties can interfere with each other — much as in noise-cancelling...

Streaming platforms are reportedly courting Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz Beckham for a documentary package that could include unseen footage from their 2022 Florida wedding and August 2025 vow renewal.

"If our hypothesized dark charge is true, then we believe there could be a significant population of primordial black holes, which would be consistent with other astrophysical observations, and account for all the missing dark matter in the universe."

NPL has joined forces with other leading National Metrology Institutes to shape the international standards effort in quantum technologies The post Joined-up thinking in quantum metrology: why collaboration is the secret of success appeared first on Physics World.

A supermassive black hole with a case of cosmic indigestion has been burping out the remains of a shredded star for four years - and it's still going strong.

Graphene encapsulation enables atomic resolution imaging of highly reactive 2D diiodides, preserving clean interfaces and extending sample stability from seconds to months.

Learn how a shredded star triggered a black hole jet that evolved into a years-long energy surge that continues to intensify.

A supermassive black hole with a case of cosmic indigestion has been burping out the remains of a shredded star for four years—and it's still going strong, new research led by a University of Oregon astrophysicist shows.

That low-frequency fuzz that can bedevil cellphone calls has to do with how electrons move through and interact in materials at the smallest scale. The electronic flicker noise is often caused by interruptions in the flow of electrons by various scattering processes in the metals that conduct them.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials promise revolutionary advances in electronics and photonics, but many of the most interesting candidates degrade within seconds of air exposure, making them nearly impossible to study or integrate into real-world technology. Transition metal dihalides represent a particularly compelling yet challenging class of materials, with predicted properties ideal for next-generation devices, but their extreme reactivity when exposed to air prevents even basic structural characterization.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered experimental evidence that particles of matter emerging from energetic subatomic smashups retain a key feature of virtual particles that exist only fleetingly in the quantum vacuum. The finding offers a new way to explore how the vacuum—once thought of as empty space—provides important ingredients needed to transform virtual "nothingness" into the matter that makes up our world.

Chronic exposure to pollution from wildfires has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually in the United States, according to a new study.

A research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an efficient, stable, atomic-scale catalyst for carbon monoxide (CO) oxidation. This advancement offers promising strategies for environmental catalysis and designing low-cost, high-performance catalysts. The study, published as a cover article in Nano-Micro Letters on January 5, addresses a long-standing challenge in catalysis.

Scientists have found “strange quarks” that originated as virtual particles that sprang from nothing

The JWST found a system of at least five interacting galaxies only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery adds weight to the growing understanding that galaxies were interacting and shaping their surroundings far earlier than scientists thought. There's also evidence that the collision was redistributing heavy elements beyond the galaxies themselves.

An array of 15,000 qubits made from phosphorus and silicon offers an unprecedentedly large platform for simulating quantum materials such as perfect conductors of electricity

Scientists have developed an innovative microscope that uses the ultimate sensor - a single atom - to reveal the invisible energy terrain that guides electrons inside quantum materials.

For the first time, the new scope allowed physicists to observe terahertz 'jiggles' in a superconducting fluid.

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a material's radiating heat. Now, MIT physicists have used terahertz light to reveal inherent, quantum vibrations in a superconducting material, which have not been observable until now.

"There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward."

A team led by Stanford physicists has developed an optical cavity that can efficiently collect single photons from single atoms. These atoms act as the building blocks of a quantum computer by storing qubits. This work enables that process for all qubits simultaneously, for the first time, according to the Stanford team. The researchers proposed an array of 40 cavities containing 40 individual atom qubits as well as a prototype with more than 500 cavities. The findings indicate a way to ultimately create a million-qubit quantum computer network. “If we want to make a quantum computer, we need to be able to read information out of the quantum bits very quickly,” said Jon Simon, the study’s senior author and the...

“Record-breaking” photons at telecom wavelengths made available on demand.

New research has emerged, showing when quantum systems are absolutely separable and fundamentally non-entangled The post Quantum states that won’t entangle appeared first on Physics World.

A new proof has emerged, confirming the universal speed limit on quantum relaxation, and providing new insights on how it works The post The secret limits governing quantum relaxation appeared first on Physics World.

Author(s): Marric StephensFabricating some structures using niobium instead of aluminum could lead to more resilient superconducting quantum computers. [Physics 19, s20] Published Tue Feb 03, 2026

Here are the 24 images shortlisted for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Nuveen People's Choice Award 2026.

Gigantic black holes lurk at the center of virtually every galaxy, including ours, but we've lacked a precise picture of what impact they have on their surroundings. However, a University of Chicago-led group of scientists has used data from a recently launched satellite to reveal our clearest look yet into the boiling, seething gas surrounding two supermassive black holes, each located in the center of massive galaxy clusters.

Can a single particle have a temperature? It may seem impossible with our standard understanding of temperature, but columnist Jacklin Kwan finds that it’s not exactly ruled out in the quantum realm

In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a "quasi-extremal primordial black hole," explodes.

Physicists have long categorized every elementary particle in our three-dimensional universe as being either a boson or a fermion—the former category mostly capturing force carriers like photons, the latter including the building blocks of everyday matter like electrons, protons, or neutrons. But in lower dimensions of space, the neat categorization starts to break down.

John Martinis has already revolutionised quantum computing twice. Now, he is working on another radical rethink of the technology that could deliver machines with unrivalled capabilities

When young stars mix with neutron stars, things get messy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a new dwarf galaxy, which received designation CAPERS-39810. Further investigation of CAPERS-39810 revealed that it is an extremely metal-poor galaxy. The discovery was detailed in a paper published January 24 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Quantum technologies, devices and systems that process, store, detect, or transfer information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, have the potential to outperform classical technologies in a variety of tasks. An ongoing quest within quantum engineering is the realization of a so-called quantum internet: a network conceptually analogous to today's internet, in which distant nodes are linked through shared quantum resources, most notably quantum entanglement.

A team of theoretical researchers has found duality can unveil non-invertible symmetry protected topological phases, which can lead to researchers understanding more about the properties of these phases, and uncover new quantum phases. Their study is published in Physical Review Letters.

Mats Larsson and Ramon Wyss reveal why Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel prize The post Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics appeared first on Physics World.

Mats Larsson and Ramon Wyss reveal why Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel prize The post Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics appeared first on Physics World.

Journalist Ross Coulthart claims the US may be hiding anti-gravity or zero point energy technology. Experts and critics remain divided.

Researchers have demonstrated that a nanoparticle of 7,000 sodium atoms can act as a wave, creating a record-setting superposition.

Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Science (NINS, Japan) and SOKENDAI have demonstrated a more than 2000% voltage-induced enhancement of near-field nonlinear optical responses. To achieve this giant modulation, they focused on an angstrom-scale gap formed between a metallic tip and substrate in a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which can strongly confine and enhance light intensity through plasmon excitation. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Particle therapy using a mix of carbon-, oxygen- and neon-ion beams helps tune the fine balance between range robustness, uniform dose and high linear energy transfer The post Multi-ion cancer therapy tackles the LET trilemma appeared first on Physics World.

A newly detected gravitational wave, GW250114, is giving scientists their clearest look yet at a black hole collision—and a powerful way to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Its clarity allowed scientists to measure multiple “tones” from the collision, all matching Einstein’s predictions. That confirmation is exciting—but so is the possibility that future signals won’t behave so neatly. Any deviation could point to new physics beyond our current understanding of gravity.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based method to dramatically tame the flood of data generated by particle detectors at modern accelerators. The new custom-built algorithm uses a neural network to intelligently compress collision data, adapting automatically to the density or "sparsity" of the signals it receives.

Recently, scientists from institutions including the University of Science and Technology of China made a fundamental breakthrough in nuclear-spin quantum precision measurement. They developed the first intercity nuclear-spin-based quantum sensor network, which experimentally constrains the axion topological-defect dark matter and surpasses the astrophysical limits. The study is published in the journal Nature.

Carbon nanotubes can open and close in response to acidity, guiding water and ions one by one and mimicking how natural cell channels work.

Quantum chaos describes chaotic classical dynamical systems in terms of quantum theory, but simulations of these systems are limited by computational resources. However, one team seems to have found a way by leveraging error mitigation and specialized circuits on a 91-qubit superconducting quantum processor. Their results are published in Nature Physics.

MACE is a next-generation experiment designed to catch muonium transforming into its antimatter twin, a process that would rewrite the rules of particle physics. The last search for this effect ended more than two decades ago, and MACE plans to leap far beyond it using cutting-edge beams, targets, and detectors. A discovery would point to entirely new forces or particles operating at extreme energy scales.

The Nation nominates Minneapolis for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, recognising its peaceful resistance against federal immigration policies and commitment to human rights.

The mystery of dark matter—unseen, pervasive, and essential in standard cosmology—has loomed over physics for decades. In new research, I explore a different possibility: Rather than postulating new particles, I propose that perhaps gravity itself behaves differently on the largest scales.

"JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was in a huge hurry to grow up."

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

Ariana Grande skips the 2026 Grammys despite winning Best Pop Duo for 'Defying Gravity'. Fans question her absence amid snub allegations and her busy filming schedule.

In some solid materials under specific conditions, mutual Coulomb interactions shape electrons into many-body correlated states, such as Wigner crystals, which are essentially solids made of electrons. So far, the Wigner crystal state remains sensitive to various experimental perturbations. Uncovering their internal structure and arrangement at the atomic scale has proven more challenging.

A new study has connected the famous m87 black hole, the first ever imaged, to its powerful cosmic jet, revealing how it launches particles at near light speed.

Researchers have discovered a hidden quantum geometry inside materials that subtly steers electrons, echoing how gravity warps light in space. Once thought to exist only on paper, this effect has now been observed experimentally in a popular quantum material. The finding reveals a new way to understand and control how materials conduct electricity and interact with light. It could help power future ultra-fast electronics and quantum technologies.

Researchers at the University of Maine and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are collaborating on a new way to dry non-aggregated cellulose nanofiber—a material that could replace plastics in a wide range of products.

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles.

Time is almost up on the way we track each second of the day, with optical atomic clocks set to redefine the way the world measures one second in the near future. Researchers from Adelaide University worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom to review the future of the next generation of timekeeping.

Researchers developed a vortex method to dry non-aggregated cellulose nanofibers from slurry, offering a more efficient, scalable alternative to freeze and spray drying.

Where is physics headed? No one knows for sure, but Beyond the Quantum by Antony Valentini is a striking new book that reminds us what a big idea really looks like, finds Jon Cartwright

Astronomers have traced the origin point of a jet of material that is thousands of light-years long emanating from the supermassive black hole M87*

Using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have found that the quark-gluon plasma that filled the universe just after the Big Bang really was a primordial "soup."

A team of researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg led by Prof. Stefanie Barz (University of Stuttgart) has demonstrated a source of single photons that combines on-demand operation with record-high photon quality in the telecommunications C-band—a key step toward scalable photonic quantum computation and quantum communication. "The lack of a high-quality on-demand C-band photon source has been a major problem in quantum optics laboratories for over a decade—our new technology now removes this obstacle," says Prof. Stefanie Barz.

Researchers from Regensburg and Birmingham have overcome a fundamental limitation of optical microscopy. With the help of quantum mechanical effects, they succeeded for the first time in performing optical measurements with atomic resolution. Their work is published in the journal Nano Letters.

The precise control of tiny droplets on surfaces is essential for advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and next‐generation lab‐on‐a‐chip diagnostics. However, once droplet volume reaches pico- and nanoliter scales, the droplets become extremely sensitive to microscopic surface irregularities, and friction at the solid‐liquid interface becomes a major obstacle to smooth transport.