Quantum Physics

Lazarus exploited a Windows flaw before its patch, using quantum-resistant encryption and compromised servers to conceal the operation

For the first time, researchers showed that solar light can be used to generate quantum-entangled photon pairs. The proof-of-principle demonstration challenges the long-held scientific belief that lasers provide the only suitable light source for producing entangled photons. In photonic quantum technologies, the high optical coherence of lasers is viewed as essential to generating quantum correlations through spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). Natural sunlight is incoherent. Also, lasers are seen as the only light sources capable of delivering the optical power densities needed to drive nonlinear optical processes efficiently. Sunlight is much less intense than laser light. Despite the perceived drawbacks of solar...

Rice University physicist Guido Pagano and his team use a trapped-ion quantum simulator, which involves manipulating an ion crystal trapped in

Discovery could support the development of safer and more efficient hydrogen storage media The post Crystal symmetry controls hydrogen’s quantum tunnelling appeared first on Physics World.

Author(s): Sophia ChenResearchers propose a new way to evaluate the performance of quantum memory devices, which will be key components in a future quantum Internet. [Physics 19, s101] Published Wed Aug 12, 2026

The math, which combines chaos, quantum theory, and infinitely complex fractal structures, has been called a “foundational result.” The post Graduate Student Proves a Quantum Uncertainty Principle for Fractals first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Quantum advantage refers to the point at which a quantum computer solves a clearly defined task faster or more efficiently than any classical computer—or makes it solvable in the first place. For many practical applications, this has not yet been demonstrated. Research therefore relies heavily on theoretical models and simulations to explore where and under what conditions such an advantage may realistically be achieved in the future.

New research explores how a material’s unusual topological behaviour is connected to the way quantum states are shared between different parts of its lattice The post When topology meets entanglement appeared first on Physics World.

Highly sensitive light sensors are needed in fields such as quantum communication, medical technology, and autonomous driving. Researchers

Every electronic and optoelectronic device generates heat, and today that heat is managed almost entirely from the outside. Heatsinks, fans, cold plates and refrigerators are bulky exterior measures bolted onto a chip or package after the fact. They treat heat as a single averaged quantity to be removed in bulk, even though the heat is actually produced locally, component by component, deep inside the circuitry.

Heat flows from hot objects to cold objects – or does it? Although unidirectional heat flow is a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy must either increase or stay the same, an international team has experimentally demonstrated that a quantum mechanism can reverse this flow of heat while remaining […] The post Quantum principle allows heat to flow from cold to hot appeared first on Physics World.

Scientists have created the first quantum material that can sort and transport different quantum states of light at room temperature, potentially removing the need for bulky, ultra-cold refrigeration systems. Built from a gold film carved with hundreds of microscopic structures, the ultrathin “metacrystal” acts like a filter that directs different kinds of quantum light along separate paths while preserving the information they carry.

Scientists have generated quantum entanglement directly from sunlight, potentially offering a lower-energy alternative to the lasers normally used in quantum technology. Their outdoor experiment produced entangled photons with about 94% similarity to an ideal state. The result could pave the way for simpler quantum satellites, secure communications, and more energy-efficient quantum computing.

Author(s): Philip BallTwo research teams have run small-scale demonstrations of voting protocols that could ensure election security using the principles of quantum mechanics. [Physics 19, 113] Published Fri Aug 07, 2026

Using light to process quantum information is one of the most promising approaches to building future quantum computers. Light particles, known as photons, are excellent carriers of quantum information, but their lack of natural interactions has created a major challenge for researchers seeking to build systems capable of performing a full range of computations.

In Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig," immortalized in Schubert's fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif"—my son, it is only a wisp of fog. In the poem, the father's reassurance proves tragically wrong. In the quantum world, however, his words acquire an uncanny new meaning.

The startup Atomiq One aims to boost the development of quantum technologies. Christian Hölzl, a postdoc at the

Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now achieved a fourfold resolution boost compared to a classical microscope, using a new optical design that sends one of the entangled photons through the microscope's optics three times rather than just once.

At the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil, the BESIII Collaboration report that, after 15 years of sustained research, it identified the dominant constituent of the X(2370) as a pseudoscalar glueball with spin-parity quantum numbers of 0⁻⁺.

Quantum errors are a normal part of quantum computing because fragile physical qubits (the tiny components storing data) can easily break down because of environmental noise, like heat, stray signals or microscopic vibrations. Typical fixes involve vast amounts of extra hardware qubits, which make computers larger, more expensive and harder to build.

A proof-of-principle experiment used concentrated sunlight to produce entangled photons

Astronomers may have just confirmed one of the quirkiest aspects of quantum mechanics: that seemingly empty space can alter the behavior of light. This phenomenon, called "vacuum birefringence," was first predicted nearly 90 years ago by Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He suggested that even a perfect vacuum should be teeming with "virtual particles" that rapidly pop in and out of existence.

A million-dollar math mystery may someday be resolved in a physics lab. A new study brings this vision one step closer.

Today's quantum technologies rely on energy-intensive lasers, raising concerns that scaling them up could further increase energy demands. In new work, researchers have demonstrated that quantum entanglement between photons can be generated directly from sunlight, offering a potential alternative.

Yonatan Cohen of Quantum Machines is our podcast guest The post Building bridges between quantum and classical computing appeared first on Physics World.

The world's first portable, room-temperature quantum computer with more than 10 qubits utilizes flawed lab-made diamonds. The quantum system fits into a standard server rack and connects to a typical power grid.

Researchers created an electrically tunable quantum nanoscale corral that traps charged excitons and enables precise electrical control of tiny light sources, including their brightness, color and quantum states, the team, led by Boston College physicists, reports today in Nature Nanotechnology.

In early 2025, special signals wended their way through a fiber-optic highway strung above the streets and sidewalks of the Maryland suburbs. The arrival of those signals at their destination marks a significant step toward a long-held dream of building a "quantum network." Researchers believe that this emerging technology could someday link quantum devices in ways that supercharge scientific research, enable ultrasecure communications and boost the power of future quantum computers.

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are often described as a "fifth state of matter": a quantum state in which many particles lose their individual identities and behave as one collective object. For more than 60 years, researchers have sought to create such condensates from excitons—electron-hole pairs—as a solid-state route to macroscopic quantum coherence, which is useful for quantum technologies. This has been difficult to realize in controllable semiconductor devices because optically generated excitons have very short lifetimes of around a billionth of a second, and BECs are normally attained with ultracold gases in a vacuum.

Scientists from Rice University in the U.S. have developed a way to precisely tune the temperature inside a trapped-ion simulator. The breakthrough means they will be able to run quantum simulations at precise temperatures that better reflect real-world conditions.

A diamond-based quantum sensor inserted into a living cell can provide previously unseen levels of detail about how life works and how diseases form. "Think of it as an EKG for a single cell—a way to capture everything happening inside at once, in real time," said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering professor Aaron Esser-Kahn. "We routinely monitor vital signs in people—heart rate, breathing, temperature—but until now, there simply hasn't been an equivalent way to take a cell's vitals."

Photons traveling through a cloud of atoms can emerge so early that they appear to have spent a negative amount of time inside. Researchers tested whether this was merely a misleading feature of the light pulse by making extremely weak measurements of the atoms. Surprisingly, the atoms confirmed the same negative dwell time. The finding does not break standard physics, but it reveals that one of quantum mechanics’ strangest effects is physically measurable.

Digital security currently relies on difficult equations to protect data. For example, when you use a credit card online, the information is locked inside a math problem that would take a modern computer thousands of years to solve. However, if someone builds a powerful enough computer, that security breaks.

Physicists have uncovered a surprising limit to electrical resistance caused by particles colliding. Using ultracold potassium atoms trapped in a grid of light, researchers created a highly controlled stand-in for electrons moving through a solid. As collisions became more frequent and intense, resistance initially rose, but eventually hit a ceiling and stopped increasing.

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for "quantum advantage"—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations.

Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have discovered a new type of quantum light emitter in diamonds that could help overcome a number of challenges facing quantum technologies.

In mathematics and getting dressed, some processes are commutative, while others are noncommutative. Commutative means the order doesn't matter (3 + 2 is the same as 2 + 3, and it doesn't matter which sock goes on first). Noncommutative means the order does matter.

Semiconductor spin qubits are one of the most promising building blocks for future quantum computers, but turning them into a working, large-scale quantum computer has so far proven difficult. For now, two big questions remain open: how to connect qubits that aren't sitting right next to each other, and how to control huge numbers of them without an unmanageable tangle of wiring.

Using IBM's quantum computer, scientists say they have shown in three different experiments that quantum computers can outpace classical machines in useful computations.

Researchers 3D-nanoprinted hollow-core Photonic Scaffolds with up to 80% cladding openness, with models predicting attenuation at or below 1 dB/mm at that openness and experiments measuring sub-1 dB/mm losses at 68% openness. The waveguides supported dye diffusion in about 34 seconds, a 1.4 nL effective interaction volume, and quantum-dot emission with output photon statistics consistent with single-photon emission after transmission.

Quantum fluctuations influence direction-dependent electrical transport in chiral magnets, researchers from Science Tokyo report. In chiral magnetic systems, electric current flows differently depending on its direction, but the role of quantum effects in this behavior has remained unclear. Through theoretical analysis, the researchers showed that chiral magnetic systems exhibit logarithmic temperature dependence at low temperatures, offering new insights into electron transport in magnetic materials. These findings are expected to play a crucial role in spintronics.

For years, researchers have tried to harness the "twist" of light to transmit data. This property describes how light spirals as it travels forward, and because it can be molded into a virtually infinite number of different twists, it provides a massive, promising alphabet for high-capacity communication.

A new study in Nature Communications has established a link between the Riemann Hypothesis and dynamical phase transitions in engineered quantum systems, demonstrating the effect on a quantum processor.

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet orbiting a faraway star, the analogy they most commonly use is trying to spot a firefly next to a massive searchlight. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim—usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star.

Researchers in City College of New York physicist Vinod M. Menon’s Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) have outlined

Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people's injuries.

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet that is orbiting a far away star, the analogy they most commonly go with is trying to spot a fireflight next to a massive search light. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim - usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star. Understandably, that makes them very difficult to see. But a new paper from Hyunsoo Choi of Hanyang University in South Korea and his co-authors, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a theoretical solution - use a mix of smart computer algorithms and quantum physics.

Most electronic memory storage devices require the ability to trap large numbers of electrons for each bit of memory. In an ideal world, however, it would take only one electron. This would reduce space requirements and power consumption for devices. Now, a team in China has realized this goal with an ultrathin device capable of minimizing the stray capacitance that plagued earlier attempts. The new study, published in Science, describes how this novel device has overcome challenges in implementing the single-electron design.

New calculations seem to have put a 25-year-old particle physics puzzle to rest. But they’ve also created a clash with other experimental results. The post Physicists Solve a Big Quantum Mystery. Now, Old Results Don’t Add Up. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Leron Borsten and Shanti Pise report from a week-long event that sought to teach quantum physics to teenagers The post Can a 16-year-old really understand quantum teleportation? appeared first on Physics World.

Quantum technologies are devices and systems that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics and could perform tasks that are difficult or impossible to tackle using their classical counterparts. These technologies process and store information using qubits (i.e., quantum bits), which can exist in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously.

By reshaping quasicrystals with carefully designed defects, researchers can create and control stable twisting beams of light in new ways. The post A new way to trap and twist light inside quasicrystals appeared first on Physics World.

A new quantum sensing technique could enable measurements of single protein structures and other important molecules, with potential applications in drug discovery and structural biology. A research team from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo developed a new method that uses a single molecule as a quantum sensor. Quantum sensors use unique properties of quantum mechanics to make ultra-precise measurements that traditional sensors cannot achieve.

Quantum computers process information in a fundamentally different way from conventional computers, using quantum bits, or qubits, that can exist in multiple states at once. This could allow them to tackle problems beyond the reach of today's machines, from simulating new materials to optimizing complex systems.

A new concept from Warwick researchers could help solve one of the biggest challenges to building large-scale quantum computers: enabling communication between vast numbers of quantum bits (qubits) over long distances across a single chip.

Neural networks have transformed how machines find patterns in data, from recognizing faces in photos to predicting the shapes of proteins. So far, all of this progress has been made on ordinary classical computers, but with quantum computers now edging into practical use, there is a real possibility that neural networks could tap into distinctly quantum effects and operate in ways that classical machines never could. So far, however, neural networks have proven far more difficult to run on quantum hardware.

Imagine holding one of our most precise quantum devices at a fixed position outside a black hole. A Josephson junction—two superconductors separated by an ultrathin barrier—can turn a voltage into a quantum oscillation with extraordinary precision. Would intense gravity change that quantum rule, or only change how a faraway observer reads the device?

The laws of thermodynamics state that heat naturally flows from hotter systems or regions to colder systems or regions until a state of thermal equilibrium is reached. This simple principle underpins the operation of numerous technologies, ranging from refrigerators to power plants.

Engineered light transforms Boehm’s brushes from a faint visual pattern into a much brighter one that could help

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.

The promise of quantum computing is to solve complex problems faster and more energy-efficiently than today's supercomputers—from optimizing logistics to simulating molecules. This goal is coming within reach as the number of qubits—the computational units of quantum computing—increases.

A research team led by SKKU professor Hosung Seo of the Department of Quantum Information Engineering and the SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington, has identified—for the first time—an atomic defect structure in the zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductor with outstanding properties for use as a "spin qubit," a core building block of future quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum sensors.

Efficient heat management in solids is key to advancing the next generation of electronics. However, wave-like heat movement—known as phonon focusing—had been observed only at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures, limiting its study and practical use.

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzNicole Yunger Halpern brings her quantum thermodynamics research to the public via analogies to a futuristic Victorian adventure. [Physics 19, 101] Published Thu Jul 23, 2026

Sending quantum information through a chain of qubits, like energy through a Newton's cradle, could be the key to faster operations and take quantum computing to the next level.

Manchester's quantum researchers are building on the Ferranti Mark I legacy, using ultra-pure silicon and single atoms to move quantum computing closer to real-world impact.

Physicists have discovered a surprisingly simple way to reproduce one of the most fascinating models in modern physics—linked to black holes, quantum chaos and exotic electronic materials—using ultracold atoms trapped in light.

This podcast also explores the intersection of general relativity and quantum information The post Quarks and qubits: how quantum computing could transform particle physics appeared first on Physics World.

In most everyday materials, such as copper, silver and silicon, the behavior of electrons is relatively predictable. In quantum materials, however, electrons can interact in complex ways, giving rise to collective electronic states with remarkable properties. Understanding how these states emerge—and, ultimately, how to control them—is one of the central challenges in quantum materials research.

For a child diagnosed with neuroblastoma—the most common infant cancer, occurring when early nerve cells grow out of

Quantum information is notoriously fragile. Internet traffic is anything but. Yet Northwestern University scientists have demonstrated they can peacefully coexist inside the same fiber-optic cable.

In recent years, research using artificial intelligence to predict material properties has advanced rapidly. Neural network quantum Monte Carlo methods have attracted attention as highly accurate simulation techniques. However, their extremely high computational cost has limited their application to small molecular systems. This study introduces a new computational method that overcomes this limitation.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have become a standard in modern devices with incredible contrast and sleek designs. While initially an expensive luxury, OLEDs are gradually becoming more financially accessible as the technology improves. Now, researchers at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM) at Nagoya University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Kyushu University have combined quantum chemistry with machine learning to identify new materials for blue OLEDs for incorporation in next-generation ultra-high-definition displays. Their research was published in Angewandte Chemie on July 21, 2026.

Author(s): Peter RöselerBy implementing a quantum neural network using two quantum-computing platforms, researchers have taken steps toward determining whether such systems can reliably fulfill their theoretical promise. [Physics 19, 100] Published Wed Jul 22, 2026