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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

A research team led by faculty at the Duke Quantum Center (DQC) has observed string-breaking dynamics related to particle-antiparticle formation on a quantum simulator, among the first such observations in quantum physics.

A study conducted by the University of Liège and Rockefeller University reveals, with near-atomic precision, the three-dimensional structure and function of a gigantic molecular machine essential to the survival of trypanosomatid parasites, which cause serious diseases in humans, animals and plants. The work has been published in Nature Communications.

Physicists searching through Large Hadron Collider data found no evidence that the machine has been producing microscopic quantum black holes, but the result sharply narrows where such exotic physics could still be hiding. These hypothetical black holes could form if extra spatial dimensions make gravity much stronger at extremely tiny scales, potentially offering clues toward the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

Author(s): Charles DayResearchers have gained access to the rich physics of a landmark model magnet by assembling a crystal out of organic magnetic molecules. [Physics 19, s121] Published Tue Sep 22, 2026

A team led by University at Buffalo physicists has found a mathematical solution that shows how a frustrated quantum magnet can transition from ultraslow behavior to ultrafast, highly entangled behavior resembling that of a black hole.

Just as a leaf drifts along with a stream, objects in other moving fluids normally drift along with the flow. That is, unless they exert energy to move against it. Although it may be less intuitive, light waves or photons work similarly. To move against a stream of light, an object or particle, like a photon, must either have an external force acting on it or actively use energy to move upstream.

Engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have designed a new type of quantum nanostructure that could enable optical neural networks. This emerging technology has the potential to make artificial intelligence systems, like large language models and image generation, faster and significantly more energy efficient.

The Van Allen radiation belts are huge, doughnut-shaped regions of highly energetic charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetosphere. These charged particles play a major role in space weather, so studying them is important for predicting and managing risks to satellites, astronauts, power grids and other infrastructure.

Hydrogen—the lightest atom—does the heavy lifting when it comes to important chemical reactions. It can be stored and released as clean fuel, and its movements help catalysts build medicines, fertilizers and materials. One way hydrogen is available for use is through a hydride—a hydrogen (H) atom bound to a metal. Yet with standard tools, this metal-bound atom can be hard to find in the structure.

An international team of astronomers from ASTRON, JIVE, the University of Amsterdam and other institutions has found the first so-called "microblazar" in the Milky Way. This stellar system is composed of a massive star and a black hole with a jet that is pointed toward Earth. The researchers also identified the region where the jet hits a molecular cloud as a place where particles are accelerated to ultra-high energies, likely up to petaelectronvolts. This would make microblazars one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the galaxy. The research was appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Stanford researchers have recorded the first real-time quantum jumps of sound, watching single phonons abruptly vanish from one energy state to another. The breakthrough could open new paths for quantum computing, error correction, highly sensitive biological sensors, and next-generation sound-based devices.

Reliably verifying the location of a device connected to the internet or other networks is important for various real-world applications. For instance, it could be valuable for authorizing financial transactions, securing communications and controlling who can access specific databases or services.

Physical qubit counts used to dominate quantum-computing announcements. They still matter, but they do not show whether a

Channing Tatum denies running an Instagram account that sparked speculation involving ex-fiancée Zoë Kravitz and Harry Styles

Understanding the origin, acceleration and propagation of high-energy cosmic rays has been a century-old mystery in astrophysics. Recently, joint observations from China's Einstein Probe (EP) satellite and the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) showed an extraordinarily long X-ray tail near a pulsar about 4,600 light-years (27 quadrillion miles) from Earth—one that had never before been seen in full. The tail extends about 42 light-years (250 trillion miles) and stretches in the same direction as ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray emission detected by LHAASO, with the two showing a close spatial match.

A perspective in Next Nanotechnology examines how integrating quantum biosensors with microfluidic organ-on-a-chip platforms could enable continuous, high-resolution monitoring of electrophysiology, metabolism, and local tissue conditions. The approach could extend measurements from the millimeter to the nanoscale, but challenges in optical and microwave integration, thermal control, fabrication, and signal processing remain.

A University of Iowa-led research team has reported in a new study the most detailed observations to date of the bow shock at Jupiter, our solar system's gas giant. The findings from NASA's Juno mission reveal key differences between Jupiter's bow shock and Earth's. They also may lead to a better understanding of the physics of how shocks function in even more powerful energy releases, such as those from dying stars. The research is published in Nature Communications.

Researchers in China have extended the lifetime of entanglement in a room-temperature, solid-state system by up to a factor of 240. Led by Shuo Ren and Rui-Jian Liang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, the team transferred entangled states from the electron spins of solid-state defects to the spins of surrounding atomic nuclei, which are far more resilient to noise. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Using data from the Japan–led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory, astronomers have directly observed a giant star's outflow, called a stellar wind, being captured by its compact companion and providing the power source for strong X-ray flares. The research is part of NASA's exploration of the extreme universe to better understand how the cosmos works.

Quantum key distribution allows two users to establish secret keys whose security is grounded in the laws of quantum mechanics. Extending this capability to multiple users is an essential step toward quantum networks that support secure communication among many participants. Quantum cryptographic conferencing addresses this need by enabling multiple users to share the same secure key, which they can then use to protect group communications.

Quantum communication networks consist of several connected nodes that exchange information encoded in quantum states. These networks could potentially enable more secure communications between quantum devices in different locations.

When the James Webb Space Telescope pointed its powerful instruments toward the early universe, scientists were surprised by what it found. At high-redshift (z) values, corresponding to less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers witnessed an abundance of galaxies that hosted what appeared to be the "seeds" of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

Charles Spencer recalls fearing that 12-year-old Prince Harry lacked sufficient care after Diana's funeral, while stressing that his memoir offers a personal account rather than independent evidence.

Scientists have found evidence that black holes of vastly different sizes may launch powerful jets according to the same universal rule. Supermassive black holes can produce jets soon after tearing apart a star, then fire up again hundreds or thousands of days later when their feeding rate drops to about 2% of the Eddington limit. That same threshold is known to trigger jets from much smaller black holes in the Milky Way.

The theory of general relativity still holds, according to new space-based and laboratory experiments The post Einstein’s equivalence principle put to two new tests appeared first on Physics World.

A modest fashion show at London's St John's Church drew online criticism shortly after the Church of England withdrew an interfaith award.

Margaret Harris reviews Trinity: an Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test The post Illuminating, beautiful and disturbing: a photographic record of the Trinity atomic test appeared first on Physics World.

Physicists have put a decades-old idea about why the strange rules of quantum mechanics disappear in our everyday world to one of its toughest experimental tests yet. Deep beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, researchers searched for an extremely faint radiation signal predicted by a theory suggesting that tiny fluctuations in spacetime, caused by gravity, gradually destroy quantum superpositions. After 62 days of measurements with a highly shielded germanium detector, they found no such signal.

Before diving into the mystery of glass, theoretical physicist Corentin Laudicina takes us back to high school physics for a moment. Although he has spent years studying exactly what happens in a material during the glass transition, he also understands that his research is not the easiest thing to explain off the cuff at the cafeteria table.

Physicists have detected strong evidence that heavy, fleeting Z bosons can become quantum entangled during Higgs boson decays at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The result shows that Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” survives even under some of the most extreme conditions ever created in a laboratory.

A decade-long NIST experiment has produced a new measurement of the universal gravitational constant that differs unexpectedly from another leading result, deepening a 225-year-old physics puzzle. The discrepancy is tiny, but for one of nature’s most fundamental constants, it is large enough to keep scientists wondering whether hidden experimental errors or something more surprising is involved.

Scientists theorize that the rapid emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe can be explained by the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) scenario. In a recent study, astronomers investigated the potential host environments of DCBHs and found that this scenario is a plausible explanation for how the "seeds" of SMBH formed.

The electronic properties of materials are typically determined by their structure under normal, undisturbed conditions, when they are in a state known as equilibrium. Intense light beams, however, can temporarily reshape a material's electronic band structure (i.e., the range of energy states available to electrons), potentially giving rise to new electronic behaviors.

New research suggests that a perplexing signal created by a pair of colliding black holes may have been warped by a space-time phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This theory could finally explain the "impossible" size of the merging singularities, but it also poses a new problem.

Neutrinos are the pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars, and our

Researchers from MIT have designed a new qubit architecture that enables qubits to interact with each other much

Author(s): Miguel Zumalacárregui and Xikai ShanGravitational waves lensed by galaxies and clusters can also be diffracted by the stars and compact remnants embedded within them, leaving frequency-dependent signatures in the observed signal that are computationally expensive to model. This paper introduces Reduced-Order Stochastic Diffraction, an efficient framework for modeling these complex microlensing effects with a computationally inexpensive surrogate model. The method can be readily incorporated into Bayesian GW analyses and adapted to different detectors, sources, and microlens populations. It therefore opens a new avenue for probing stellar populations through gravitational-wave lensing. [Phys. Rev. D 114, 063038] Published Fri Sep 18, 2026

Author(s): Gang Li, Chuan-Qiang Song, Feng-Jie Tang, and Jiang-Hao YuCoherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering provides crucial information for precision studies of neutrinos as well as searches for dark matter and other new physics. This paper develops a comprehensive Effective Field Theory treatment up to dimension eight which can account for new physics effects from energies above 100 GeV down to nuclear scales in a consistent manner. The authors include renormalization effects, careful power counting and matching of different theories at the appropriate scales, and possible UV completions of the effective operators. [Phys. Rev. D 114, 055032] Published Fri Sep 18, 2026

Author(s): Sam JarmanA recent experiment points the way toward making the intense, energetic beams of positrons needed for next-generation electron–positron colliders. [Physics 19, 127] Published Fri Sep 18, 2026

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have extended the search for evidence of microscopic black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The formation of these tiny, fleeting objects at the LHC represents one way theorists have sought to resolve anomalies in our understanding of the basic structure of spacetime, while the method used to look for them demonstrates a new way of searching for new particles.

Molecular gases are a new form of artificial quantum matter. However, when these molecules collide, they are often lost extremely rapidly. Researchers from Radboud University and Columbia University have been able to suppress this collisional loss, paving the way for strongly interacting quantum matter. This new artificial quantum matter allows researchers to study quantum behavior relevant to electrons in real materials. Their results are published in Science.

A new way to accurately measure the distance between quasar pairs—the blazing, black-hole-powered centers of distant galaxies that appear side by side in space—is showing promise through University of Alberta research.

A new approach that changes just one atom in plastic-degrading enzymes could help make them more efficient while maintaining their stability, according to new research from The Australian National University published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Scientists have found a new way to create a controlled beam of muonium, an exotic atom containing a heavier cousin of the electron. The advance could allow researchers to test for the first time whether gravity acts on second-generation particles exactly as Einstein’s theory predicts. Any unexpected difference would be a major surprise and could potentially point toward new physics, including a hypothetical fifth force.

Design awards are a signal, not a guarantee. The agencies that win Red Dot, Webby, Apple Design Awards,

Beauty and mystery—it is hard to imagine a more alluring combination, and this is precisely what we encounter when we observe phenomena in the nanoworld. But are we really sure that observations made using modern microscopic techniques do not influence what is happening there? A comparison of images of copper oxide nanoparticles reacting with chloroauric acid, obtained using electron and photon beams, has yielded unexpected results.

A team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed an approach that enabled them to directly observe how electrons interact with defects in advanced semiconductor devices in unprecedented detail. The team's methodology included an innovative simulation tool that enabled accurate theoretical interpretations of its experimental observations.

Physicists at The City College of New York have demonstrated a new way to transfer microwave signals onto light using magnetic waves inside a layered semiconductor. The work establishes a materials platform for building interfaces that could one day link quantum computers through optical networks. The research, titled "Microwave-to-optical transduction using magnon–exciton coupling," was led by the Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) at CCNY, headed by physics professor Vinod M. Menon. It appears in the journal Nature Materials.

Somewhere between the microscopic realm of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of human beings, something strange happens: The rules of quantum physics, which work so exquisitely for tiny atoms, seem to lose their grip as objects grow larger. Pondering where and how this shift from small-scale quantum fuzziness to everyday sharp certainty happens gives rise to thought-experiment oddities like Schrödinger's famous dead-and-alive cat. The process by which quantum phenomena like superposition—the paradoxical affliction of Schrödinger's cat—fade into the classical reality we experience is known as decoherence.

The picture – The Quiet Predator– was taken by Kuwaiti photographer Ali Alobaidly The post Spectacular image of the Shark Nebula wins Royal Observatory Greenwich prize appeared first on Physics World.

A Stanford team has documented the first direct observation of quantum jumps of sound in a mechanical resonator, completing an arc of scientific exploration that started more than 100 years ago.

Quantum computers are no longer theoretical concepts. Today, they are being developed to tackle a range of complex problems, including exploring financial risk, modeling complex molecules and optimizing massive logistics networks. However, until now, there has been no way to benchmark the computational power of different systems on the same scale to see how they compare.

Physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a technology that uses quantum sensors to measure biomagnetic signals, such as heart activity. Researchers from the DIAQNOS (DIAmond-based Quantum Sensing for NeurOSurgery) flagship project, coordinated by Dr. Arne Wickenbrock in Mainz, have demonstrated the potential of quantum technology for future medical applications.

An early-career Western Australian astrophysicist has helped uncover a universal rule behind one of the most powerful behaviors in the universe: when black holes launch jets. The discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, shows black holes appear to fire off powerful jets at the same critical point in their feeding cycle—whether they are about 10 times the mass of the sun or millions of times heavier.

Computer simulations find that overmassive black holes form readily in the early universe. Their spectra match that of Little Red Dots, which later become powerful quasars and supermassive galactic black holes.

Jonathan Halliwell explains how quantum decoherence is key to understanding how we transition from a world with a wave-like nature of matter and energy to the classical macroscopic world that we’re used to. The post Where Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A pocket-sized, roughly $100 detector can reveal the invisible stream of cosmic particles constantly passing through Earth and even through our bodies. What began as a student physics project is now being used in major experiments, balloon missions, and potentially future spacecraft.

New supercomputer simulations suggest JWST’s puzzling Little Red Dots are rapidly growing black holes from the early Universe. Extreme radiation may have helped create unusually massive black hole seeds, while dense surrounding gas allowed them to grow dozens of times faster than black holes can today. The simulated objects closely resemble the Little Red Dots seen by Webb. If correct, they could solve the mystery of how enormous black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Laser-driven inertial fusion company Marvel Fusion has launched Caelora, a wholly-owned subsidiary to commercialize high-energy laser technology. As a separate legal entity, Caelora is intended to shorten the technical learning curve for high-energy laser systems and strengthen the supply chain upon which fusion will depend. With the launch of its Caelora subsidiary, Marvel Fusion has become the latest fusion company to pursue revenue streams outside the confines of yet-to-be-realized fusion power plants. Courtesy of Marvel Fusion. Caelora builds on core technology developed under Marvel Fusion’s laser program in cooperation with Pulsed Light Technologies (PLT), which was funded by SPRIND, the German Federal Agency for...

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, will dismantle the Large Hadron Collider, which helped discover the so-called God Particle, in order to build a more powerful particle accelerator.

Nanostructured device efficiently transforms light into different frequencies – including those at technologically important near-infrared wavelengths The post Metasurface optical device boosts nonlinear frequency conversion appeared first on Physics World.

Author(s): Sophia ChenResearchers demonstrate a new quantum memory device that will enable faraway nodes in a network to coordinate in time, a key ingredient for a future quantum Internet. [Physics 19, s120] Published Wed Sep 16, 2026

When a material heats up, its electrical resistance often rises. The harder question is what, exactly, is getting in the way. The electrons carrying the current may be scattered by vibrations of the material's atomic lattice, known as phonons. They may also collide with one another. Frustratingly, a conventional temperature test warms the electrons and the lattice together, so the effects arrive tangled in the same resistance measurement.

In March 2026, scientists succeeded in transporting antiprotons by road for the first time in a purpose-built trap loaded on a truck. The BASE collaboration, which realized this experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva under the lead of Professor Dr Stefan Ulmer and Dr Christian Smorra from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), now presents its findings and experiences from this pioneering experiment in the journal Nature. Among other things, they report that it was possible to store antiprotons in a mobile transport vessel for more than a month for the first time ever.