Physics

Nov 27th, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. In today's digital age, silicon is king. But as with other semiconductors that are widely used in the industry, trace quantities of other elements are often added to silicon to influence its electronic behaviour, a process known as doping. Now, scientists have taken doping to a new level, ... [Read More]

Nov 27th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Physicists have checked again whether light of different colors travels at different speeds, and once more it seems not to budge. They timed energetic photons from distant cosmic blasts to see whether high energy ones ever reached their detectors ahead of the rest. The project draws on data from space based and ground based gamma-ray observatories watching sources billions of miles away. Working across institutions in Spain and Portugal, the team used bursts with photon ... [Read More]

Nov 22nd, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Scientists have built a new kind of molecular qubit that could help connect quantum computers over existing telecommunications technology — laying the foundation for a future quantum internet. The new qubit contains a rare-earth element called erbium , which has optical and magnetic ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 2025 - Quantum computing tech keeps edging forward IBM follows through on its June promises, plus more trapped ion news. The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they've reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these announcements involve interesting new architectures like the one we looked at recently, they're a good way to mark progress in the field, and they ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Time crystals could help create quantum computing data storage that lasts minutes, new research shows — a huge improvement on the milliseconds-long duration of existing quantum data storage. In the new research, scientists ran experiments on how time crystals interact with mechanical ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - High-temperature superconductivity is still not fully understood. Now, an international research team at BESSY II has measured the energy of charge carrier pairs in undoped La₂CuO₄. Their findings revealed that the interaction energies within the potentially superconducting copper oxide layers are significantly lower than those in the insulating lanthanum oxide layers. These results contribute to a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity and could also be relevant ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Scientists at Quantinuum have unveiled the world's most powerful quantum computer. The team claims the new system is capable of solving a problem that a supercomputer could handle only if it consumed more power than the total wattage of a quasar — one of the brightest objects in the ... [Read More]

Nov 4th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A team led by MIT used a simple molecule to peek inside a radium atom's nucleus. In a new study, they watched electrons in radium monofluoride pick up a tiny energy change that betrays what is happening deep in the core. The tests ran on a compact setup at CERN in Switzerland and not in a collider that stretches for miles. The result points to a practical way to map nuclear structure and to probe why the universe favors matter over antimatter. Radium monofluoride reveals ... [Read More]

Nov 2nd, 2025 - "Anomalous" heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Learn more. The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine . If there's one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it's the second ... [Read More]

Oct 31st, 2025 - The uncertainty inherent to quantum mechanics has long left physicists wondering whether the observations we make on the quantum level reflect reality - a new test suggests they do Does quantum mechanics really reflect nature in its truest form, or is it just our imprecise way of describing the weird properties of the very small? A famous test that can help answer this question has now been tried on a quantum computer, and it comes to a surprisingly concrete conclusion. Quantum mechanics really ... [Read More]

Oct 30th, 2025 - Scientists have long sought to make semiconductors—vital components in computer chips and solar cells—that are also superconducting, thereby enhancing their speed and energy efficiency and enabling new quantum technologies. However, achieving superconductivity in semiconductor materials such as silicon and germanium has proved challenging due to difficulty in maintaining an optimal atomic structure with the desired conduction behavior. In a paper published in the journal Nature ... [Read More]

Oct 29th, 2025 - Carbynes, or long linear carbon chains (LLCCs), have received significant attention in recent years due to their predicted exceptional properties. However, experimentally, their properties have been hard to probe due to their low stability. To improve stability, it is necessary to encapsulate LLCCs in small diameter carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Now, researchers have developed a new method to synthesize small diameter single-walled carbon nanowires (SWCNWs), featuring high-density LLCCs encapsulated ... [Read More]

Oct 22nd, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Google scientists have created a new algorithm that can solve problems on a quantum processor 13,000 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers . They say it brings us one step closer to using quantum computers in drug discovery, materials science and many other scientific ... [Read More]

Oct 22nd, 2025 - An approach it calls "quantum echoes" takes 13,000 times longer on a supercomputer. A few years back, Google made waves when it claimed that some of its hardware had achieved quantum supremacy , performing operations that would be effectively impossible to simulate on a classical computer. That claim didn't hold up especially well, as mathematicians later developed methods to help classical computers catch up , leading the company to repeat the work on an improved processor. While this ... [Read More]

Oct 22nd, 2025 - The nature of gravity — and whether it can be reconciled with quantum mechanics — is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Most researchers think that at a fundamental level, all phenomena follow the principles of quantum physics, but those principles do not seem to be compatible with the accepted theory of gravity. For years, researchers have been proposing experiments to show whether gravity could produce a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. Now, two theoretical ... [Read More]

Oct 22nd, 2025 - An approach it calls "quantum echoes" takes 13,000 times longer on a supercomputer. A few years back, Google made waves when it claimed that some of its hardware had achieved quantum supremacy , performing operations that would be effectively impossible to simulate on a classical computer. That claim didn't hold up especially well, as mathematicians later developed methods to help classical computers catch up , leading the company to repeat the work on an improved processor. While this ... [Read More]