The physics desk
Physics from the quantum to the cosmos: particle physics, quantum computing, astrophysics, cosmology and the discoveries that change what is possible.
A precessing black hole jet in galaxy VV 340a is sweeping hot plasma across its entire host galaxy like a cosmic sprinkler, stripping star-forming gas at a rate equivalent to 19 suns per year.
Physicists at MIT have directly observed the quantum oscillations of electrons inside a superconductor for the first time in history, publishing results in Nature that could accelerate the search for room-temperature superconductors and next-generation wireless technology.
University of Colorado Boulder engineers have built a laser control chip using standard semiconductor manufacturing that could make million-qubit trapped-ion quantum computers physically feasible for the first time.
A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shown that the standard explanation for a key magnetic phenomenon used to design memory and sensor devices for twenty years was fundamentally incorrect.
A niobium-rhenium alloy identified at NTNU can carry both electrical and spin current with zero resistance, a breakthrough theorists have been predicting for fifteen years and that could reshape quantum computing hardware.
A team at Heidelberg University unified the Fermi polaron model and Anderson's orthogonality catastrophe by showing that even infinitesimal quantum recoil fundamentally changes how impurity particles interact with quantum environments.
A collaboration between Rice University and the Vienna University of Technology identified a quantum phase that simultaneously exhibits topological protection and quantum criticality — properties physicists had assumed were mutually exclusive.
Scientists at China's EAST tokamak achieved stable plasma at 1.65 times above the Greenwald density limit — a ceiling considered impassable for decades — using a technique that could scale to future commercial fusion reactors.
Using the CHIME Outrigger telescope array spanning from Canada to West Virginia, scientists pinpointed FRB 20250316A — nicknamed RBFLOAT — to a 45-light-year region in galaxy NGC 4141, 130 million light-years away, with the James Webb Space Telescope finding an unexpected infrared glow at the same location.
The SuperCDMS experiment at SNOLAB has cooled to 0.02 kelvin — 100 times colder than deep space — and is now entering final commissioning before beginning its hunt for light dark matter particles in mid-2026.
Physicists at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel published in Nature the first demonstration of all-optical, room-temperature control of a ferromagnet's magnetic orientation, using twisted layers of molybdenum ditelluride and a focused laser beam to switch collective electron spin states permanently.
The LHCb collaboration announced the observation of the Xi-cc-plus baryon — containing two charm quarks and one down quark, roughly four times heavier than a proton — at the Moriond conference on March 17, bringing the total LHC particle zoo to 80 discovered species.
Using spintronic terahertz emitters to circumvent the diffraction limit, physicists led by Alexander von Hoegen observed for the first time the collective oscillation of Cooper pairs inside a superconducting copper-oxide material — a breakthrough that could accelerate the development of room-temperature superconductors.
By etching a hexagonal pattern of holes into a magnetic film, researchers at Illinois made magnetic spin waves obey the same mathematical rules as graphene's famously massless electrons — a finding published in Physical Review X that could shrink microwave devices by orders of magnitude.
A QuTech-led team at Delft University published the first real-time, single-shot measurement of Majorana qubit parity in Nature, achieving coherence times exceeding one millisecond and resolving a fundamental experimental barrier that has blocked topological quantum computing for decades.
A University of Texas at Austin team cooled an atomically thin sheet of nickel phosphorus trisulfide to watch it spontaneously form the paired magnetic vortex structures predicted by the 1970s BKT theory — confirming that topologically protected magnetic states can exist in actual crystals, with potential implications for next-generation data storage.
Professor Ryo Shimano's team used ultrafast laser pulses to capture frame-by-frame footage of magnetic switching in manganese-tin — a material that had been almost entirely invisible to physicists — and discovered a heat-free switching pathway that could enable magnetic memory and logic ten times faster than today's best MRAM chips.
A University of Illinois team etched hexagonal hole patterns into thin magnetic films and found that spin waves inside follow the same massless-particle equations as electrons in graphene, enabling a new class of micrometer-scale microwave devices that could transform 6G hardware and quantum computing control circuits.
Professor Nuh Gedik's team used their new spintronic terahertz emitter and Bragg-mirror system to directly image the Higgs amplitude mode of a superconductor for the first time — a collective electron oscillation predicted for decades but never seen — with major implications for room-temperature superconductors and 6G wireless.
The upgraded LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider has observed the Ξcc⁺ (Xi-cc-plus), a doubly charmed baryon predicted by theory but disputed for two decades, with 7-sigma confidence — resolving a long-standing mystery and giving physicists a new probe of the strong nuclear force.
Ryo Shimano's team at the University of Tokyo used ultrafast laser pulses to capture the fastest magnetic movie ever recorded inside manganese-tin, revealing a non-thermal spin-switching mechanism that is far more energy efficient than previously known and could enable terahertz-speed spintronic computers.
UC Santa Barbara's Stephen Wilson led the discovery of a triangular lattice antiferromagnet exhibiting 'double frustration,' where magnetic and bond frustration coexist and interact, providing a new handle for accessing and controlling the exotic entangled quantum states needed for quantum computing.
Researchers at the Université de Genève and the University of Salerno have experimentally detected the 'quantum metric' — a curvature of the quantum space inside materials — proving that electrons follow bent paths analogous to how Einstein's gravity bends light, with implications for terahertz electronics and superconductivity.
By operating control electronics at millikelvin temperatures alongside the qubits themselves — a breakthrough that physicists called theoretically infeasible for decades — D-Wave has demonstrated a credible path to quantum computers with hundreds of thousands of qubits.
IBM unveiled the industry's first reference architecture for integrating quantum processors with GPU and CPU clusters, and named Q4 2026 as the target for verified cases of quantum computers outperforming classical machines on commercially relevant tasks.
The first direct measurement of the Migdal effect — a secondary electron signal produced when dark matter nudges an atomic nucleus — validates a key tool for detecting lighter dark matter candidates and immediately upgrades sensitivity projections for every major search experiment.
By operating control electronics at near-absolute-zero temperatures alongside the trapped ions themselves, researchers from Fermilab and MIT Lincoln Laboratory have demonstrated a path to millions of qubits that bypasses the wiring bottleneck that has stalled quantum computing scale-up.
An international team using IBM's atom-manipulation tools has built and verified a molecule with never-before-seen electronic topology, confirming a theoretical prediction and using quantum computing simulation to prove its exotic nature.
A team at the University of Geneva has experimentally confirmed a 20-year-old theoretical prediction, measuring a hidden curvature in quantum materials that could unlock faster electronics and better superconductors.
The LHCb experiment has observed the Ξcc⁺ particle — containing two charm quarks — with 7-sigma confidence, opening a precision window on the strong nuclear force that binds all atomic matter.