Physics

A research team at the University of Vienna reports quantum interference of sodium nanoparticles containing more than 7,000 atoms, using a source that can produce clusters up to about 10,000 atoms. “Intuitively, one would expect such a large lump of metal to behave like a classical particle,” lead author and doctoral student Sebastian Pedalino said…

Neutrinos, discovered in 1956, are small, fundamental particles that can pass through objects without interacting with matter. The particles interact only through gravity and the weak nuclear force, meaning they can pass through massive objects with an extremely small chance of interacting with any atoms. Neutrinos are little understood, despite being the most abundant particle…

Researchers from Johns Hopkins published a study providing evidence for the theory that mysterious gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark matter particles colliding.  Steps towards solving decades-long mystery These gamma rays were first detected in 2009, and their origins have stumped scientists ever since. Some have theorized that…

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in quantum mechanics on Tuesday. The scientists showed that two properties of quantum mechanics could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye. They will share a prize of 11 million…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named on 20 of the 2025 R&D 100 Awards, 17 as lead developer and three as co-developer.  The showing sets a new record for the lab, accounting for about one-fifth of all winners. Since the 1980s, ORNL has won more than 260 R&D 100 Awards Our sister publication engineering.com recently…

The official 2025 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. This worldwide science and innovation competition, now in its 63rd year, received entries from organizations around the world. This year’s judging panel included industry professionals from across the globe who evaluated breakthrough innovations in technology and science. The Winners are listed below by…

R&D World has announced the winners of the 2025 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The honorees were selected by a panel of 54 prestigious industry experts from around the globe. The list of 2025 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters. These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at…

[Image courtesy of Adobe Stock] An international team led by Keun Su Kim at Yonsei University has directly measured the quantum metric tensor, also called the quantum distance, in a real material for the first time. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) at the U.S. Advanced Light Source, researchers mapped how electrons in black phosphorus interact…

This week in R&D: the first quantum computer in space is now orbiting the Earth; a potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s, thanks to cancer drugs; a startup is breaking ground on their first fusion power plant, they say they are on track to deliver fusion energy by 2030; Google DeepMind announced their AI Earth mapping…

In this week’s R&D roundup, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory lands a deal to construct a cutting-edge telescope for space surveillance, while researchers crack the 1918 flu virus genome. In tech, Intel mulls bowing out of the bleeding-edge chip battle as it continues to struggle to adapt in a quickly-evolving hardware landscape while NVIDIA sees a…

Big Blue is making a bold claim. “We feel at IBM, we’ve cracked the code to quantum error correction, and it’s our plan to build the first large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer, which we call IBM Quantum Starling, in 2029,” Jay Gambetta, vice president of IBM Quantum, announced at a recent press conference. From trial and…

President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to slash reactor-licensing reviews to 18 months and instructed every federal science agency to follow a newly defined “gold standard science” playbook that emphasizes reproducibility, transparent data and conflict-of-interest checks. The executive order calls for studies that are “reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer…

Quantum dots hold significant promise for next-generation sensors and displays, but manufacturing hurdles often stand in the way of widespread use. Traditional methods struggle to evenly coat the complex, textured surfaces ideal for advanced devices, especially over large areas or in precise patterns. To tackle such hurdles, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have conformally coated…

A deep learning system known as Aardvark Weather offers accurate weather forecasts that are orders of magnitude quicker to generate than existing systems. Described in a Nature article (currently posted as a preprint), the system can generate predictions on four NVIDIA A100 GPUs that would otherwise take roughly 1,000 node-hours on a traditional supercomputer system…

Light: it’s fast, massless, and goes straight through stuff. Right? Well, physicists in Italy just said, “Hold my espresso,” and turned light into something that’s both a solid and a liquid. Yes, you read that correctly. They’ve created a supersolid out of light, a feat previously thought to be the exclusive domain of ridiculously cold atoms. Researchers in Italy have…

The Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics boasts a winners’ list including intellectual giants like elementary particle theorist Murray Gell-Mann, renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and quantum pioneer Roger Penrose. For 2025, Samson Shatashvili has joined their ranks. The Trinity College Dublin physicist was honored by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical…

One might assume that galaxies in our universe would have no favored spin, rotating randomly either clockwise or counterclockwise. Yet a recent discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) challenges this fundamental notion. JWST’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) analyzed 263 galaxies from the early universe and revealed a significant asymmetry: roughly 66% spin…

Could a new telescope unearth cosmic recipes for life? Can a cell patch rescue fading eyesight? And what’s with bubbles “galloping” in a lab? This week’s research roundup probes the surprising frontiers of astronomy, medicine, archaeology, and more — raising as many questions as it answers. Read on for highlights that challenge familiar assumptions and…

As NASA prepares to launch SPHEREx, another groundbreaking mission led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is set to hitch a ride. The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, mission consists of four small, suitcase-sized spacecraft designed and built by SwRI. While SPHEREx embarks on a quest to map the universe and…

One of the primary challenges of nuclear power is disposing of its waste, which stays radioactive for extended periods and poses risks to human health and the environment. Researchers at Ohio State University have developed a battery capable of converting nuclear waste into electricity, potentially offering a method to repurpose this hazardous material. Turning radiation…

UltraSonic Photonics, developed by the University of Pittsburg, with help from the National Energy Technology Laboratory and Sensible Photonics, is a sensor system that monitors large-scale infrastructure under stress, offering novel capabilities in detecting potential failures before they occur. The technology uses ultrasonic waves and optical fiber cables to “listen” for changes in the structural…

According to a recent study by U.S. and Canadian scientists, the carbon in our bodies may have traveled far beyond our galaxy before becoming part of Earth. Published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research confirms that carbon and other elements forged in stars do not remain stationary in space but circulate through a vast…

Metrology, the science of measurement, underpins modern industry, offering the standards that define how we measure the world. At its core, optical metrology relies on interference fringes — the alternating light and dark bands that appear when light waves interact constructively and destructively. This fundamental principle has remained largely unchanged since Thomas Young’s double-slit experiments…

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) have announced a new collaboration to advance the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) into space. This next-generation effort, called the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) mission, aims to improve black hole imaging by combining ground-based radio…

Northwestern University has joined the international consortium constructing the Giant Magellan Telescope, a $2.54 billion observatory poised to become one of the world’s most powerful astronomical instruments. The consortium now includes 15 leading research institutions from the United States, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan. Northwestern brings expertise in astrophysics and artificial intelligence…