Physics

Feb 7th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Researchers have demonstrated a new way to capture light from many individual atoms at the same time, allowing their quantum information to be read in parallel rather than one by one. The advance could significantly speed up the transition of quantum machines from delicate laboratory experiments to systems large enough to solve practical problems. A scalable path to quantum readout At Stanford , Jon Simon and colleagues created a grid of tiny light traps in which each ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - Quantum physics paints a strange picture of the world, one filled with spooky connections, unsettling uncertainties and—perhaps oddest of all—particles that spontaneously spring into being from the void. These so-called virtual particles have indirect effects that scientists have measured before. But now, for the first time, researchers have traced the evolution of these something-out-of-nothing particles directly. In a study published today in Nature, physicists at the Relativistic ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - An array of 15,000 qubits made from phosphorus and silicon offers an unprecedentedly large platform for simulating quantum materials such as perfect conductors of electricity An unprecedently large quantum simulator could shed light on how exotic, potentially useful quantum materials work and help us optimise them in the future. Quantum computers may eventually harness quantum phenomena to complete calculations that are intractable for the world's best conventional computers . Similarly, a ... [Read More]

Feb 4th, 2026 - Physicists have a wild new explanation for the impossible energy spike that shouldn't exist in our universe. In 2023, a subatomic particle smashed into the Mediterranean Sea with enough energy to rattle the foundations of physics. The particle was a neutrino, a fundamental subatomic particle that usually slips through the Earth unnoticed. Approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every single second. These nearly massless, electrically neutral "ghost particles," primarily ... [Read More]

Jan 25th, 2026 - Schrödinger's cat just got a little bit fatter. Physicists have created the largest ever 'superposition' — a quantum state in which an object exists in a haze of possible locations at once. A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster ... [Read More]

Jan 11th, 2026 - Less than a trillionth of a second: Ultrafast UV light could transform communications and imaging. Scientists have developed a new platform that produces ultrashort UV-C laser pulses and detects them at room temperature using atom-thin materials. The light flashes last just femtoseconds and can be used to send encoded messages through open space. The system, from Light Publishing Center, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics And Physics, CAS, relies on efficient laser generation and ... [Read More]

Dec 28th, 2025 - As astrophysicists, we are trained to be cautious. New theories appear frequently, and most do not survive careful examination. Yet every so often, a framework emerges that does something unusual: it does not contradict what we already observe, it does not multiply speculative entities, and it does not demand that decades of experimental evidence be discarded. Instead, it quietly suggests that we may have misunderstood something fundamental. I recently encountered such a framework. It is known ... [Read More]

Dec 25th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google For centuries, most scientists have shared the belief that light behaves as both a wave and a particle. This idea, then, became the central component to quantum theory, sprouting the field of science known as quantum mechanics. The double-slit experiment supported the idea, showing bright and dark bands that indicated wave-like interference. But now, a new study suggests that this experiment might not lock us into seeing light as a wave. According to the experts, we can ... [Read More]

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 25th, 2025 - Researchers have designed a particle accelerator with nanotubes smaller than a human hair. We're used to seeing ever greater particle accelerators — colossal machines sprawling across landscapes, built to reveal the smallest details of the universe. Think of the Large Hadron Collider and its 27-kilometer-long ring, not to mention the $9 billion that went into its construction and operation thus far. But a new study from an international team of physicists, led by researchers at the ... [Read More]

Nov 24th, 2025 - Scientists link two distant quantum dots, teleporting information between their photons for the first time. Every message we send online, whether a bank transfer or a meme, relies on light. Tiny pulses travel through fiber-optic cables, bouncing between nodes that amplify the signal every few dozen kilometers. Your internet might come from your wireless carrier or WiFI, but broadband's backbone is still fiber-optic cables. But the quantum internet of the future — an ultra-secure network ... [Read More]

Nov 24th, 2025 - CERN's ALPHA collaboration has pulled off a stunning breakthrough. Trapping antimatter is kind of like trying to catch snowflakes with a frying pan — if the snowflakes wanted to blow up the pan every time they touched it. That's basically the daily grind for CERN physicists who study antihydrogen. For years, they've been capturing these fragile anti-atoms one by one, inching toward answers about one of the universe's biggest mysteries. Now, they've made a major leap. The ALPHA ... [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 7th, 2025 - A team of researchers at the Max Born Institute have managed to fully characterize few-femtosecond-long light pulses tunable in the vacuum ultraviolet. These results unlock the possibility for studying valence electron dynamics of many materials in the VUV. The research is in the journal Nature Photonics . Few-femtosecond long pulses tunable across the ultraviolet (UV) are a holy grail of contemporary laser science. As most of the materials have electronic resonances in the deep- and vacuum-UV ... [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]