Denver-based Lux Aeterna announced plans Dec. 17 to land its debut reusable satellite at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, shortly after launching on a SpaceX rideshare mission in early 2027.
The latest episode of Physics World Stories takes you inside CUWiP+, the Conference for Undergraduate Women and Non-Binary Physicists, and the role the annual event plays in shaping early experiences of studying physics.
The episode features June McCombie from the University of Nottingham, who discusses what happens at CUWiP+ events and why they are so important for improving the retention of women and non-binary students in STEM. She reflects on how the conferences create space for students to explore career paths, build confidence and see themselves as part of the physics community.
Reflections and tips from CUWiP+ 2025
University of Birmingham students Tanshpreet Kaur and Harriett McCormick share their experiences of attending the 2025 CUWiP+ event at the University of Warwick and explain why they are excited for the next event, set for Birmingham, 19–22 March 2026. They describe standout moments from 2025, including being starstruck at meeting Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered radio pulsars in 1967.
The episode provides practical advice to get the most out of the event. Organizers design the programme to cater for all personalities – whether you thrive in lively, social situations, or prefer time to step back and reflect. Either way, CUWiP+ offers opportunities to be inspired and to make meaningful connections.
Hosted by Andrew Glester, the episode highlights how shared experiences and supportive networks can balance the often-solitary nature of studying physics, especially when you feel excluded from the majority group.
Quantum physics, kung-fu, LEGO and singing are probably not things you would normally put together. But that’s exactly what happened at this year’s Quantum Carousel.
The event is a free variety show where incredible performers from across academia and industry converge for an evening of science communication. Held in Bristol, UK, on 14 November 2025, this was the second year the event was run – and once again it was entirely sold out.
As organizers, our goal was to bring together those involved in quantum and adjacent fields for an evening of learning and laughter. Each act was only seven minutes long and audience participation was encouraged, with questions saved for the dinner and drinks intervals.
All together now Speakers at Quantum Carousel 2025, which was organized by Zulekha Samiullah (second from right) and Hugh Barrett (far right). (Courtesy: Yolan Ankaine)
The evening kicked off with a rousing speech and song from Chris Stewart, motivating the promotion of science communication and understanding. Felix Flicker related electron spin rotations to armlocks, with a terrific demonstration on volunteer Tony Short, while Michael Berry entertained us all with his eye-opening talk on how quantum physics has democratized music.
PhD student double act Eesa Ali and Sebastien Bisdee then welcomed volunteers to the stage to see who could align a laser fastest. Maria Violaris expertly taught us the fundamentals of quantum error correction using LEGO.
Mike Shubrook explained the quantum thermodynamics of beer through stand-up comedy. And finally, John Rarity and his assistant Hugh Barrett (event co-organizer and co-author of this article) rounded off the night by demonstrating the magic of entanglement.
Our event sponsors introduced the food and drinks portions of the evening, with Antonia Seymour (chief executive of IOP Publishing) and Matin Durrani (editor-in-chief of Physics World)opening the dinner interval, while Josh Silverstone (founder and chief executive of Hartley Ultrafast) kickstarted the networking drinks reception.
Singing praises
Whether it was singing along to an acoustic guitar or rotating hands to emulate electron spin, everyone got involved, and feedback cited audience participation as a highlight.
“The event ran very smoothly, it was lots of fun and a great chance to network in a relaxed atmosphere,” said one attendee. Another added: “The atmosphere was really fun, and it was a really nice event to get loads of the quantum community together in an enjoyable setting.”
Appreciation of the atmosphere went both ways, with one speaker saying that their favourite part of the night was that “the audience was very inviting and easy to perform to”.
Audience members also enjoyed developing a better understanding of the science that drives their industry. “I understood it and I don’t have any background in physics,” said one attendee. “I feel a marker of being a good scientist is being able to explain it in layperson’s terms.”
Reaching out
With the quantum community rapidly expanding, it needs people from a wide range of backgrounds such as computer science, engineering and business. Quantum Carousel was designed to strike a balance between high-level academic discussion and entertainment through entry-level talks, such as explaining error correction with props, or relating research to impact from stimulated emission to CDs.
By focusing on real-world analogies, these talks can help newcomers to develop an intuitive and memorable understanding. Meanwhile, those already in the field can equip themselves with new ways of communicating elements of their research.
We look forward to hosting Quantum Carousel again in the future. We want to make it bigger and better, with an even greater range of diverse acts.
But if you’re interested in organizing a similar outreach event of your own, it helps to consider how you can create an environment that can best spark connections between both speakers and attendees. Consider your audience and how your event can attract different people for different reasons. In our case, this included the chance to network, engage with the performances, and enjoy the food and drink.
Quantum Carousel was founded by Zulekha Samiullah in 2024, and she and Hugh Barrett now co-lead the event. Quantum Carousel 2025 was sponsored by the QE-CDT, IOP Publishing and Hartley Ultrafast.
In this episode of Space Minds, host Mike Gruss moderates a timely panel discussion at the Spacepower conference on how commercial space capabilities are reshaping national security, civil space, and military decision-making.
Max Space, a startup developing expandable module technologies, plans to build a commercial space station that could launch on a single Falcon 9 rocket.
Germany’s first national space security strategy was unveiled last month to much fanfare. And who’s surprised? It was long overdue, and puts into plain language a simple but vital truth: space is now a theatre of power. With Russia and China long having treated orbit as contested territory, and the United States preparing daily for […]
Scaling up The IBS Center for Van der Waals Quantum Solids (IBS-VdWQS) acts as a catalyst for advances in fundamental materials science and condensed-matter physics. The purpose-built facility is colocated on the campus of POSTECH, one of Korea’s leading universities. (Courtesy: IBS)
Our multidisciplinary team aims to create heteroepitaxial van der Waals quantum solids at system scales, where the crystal lattices and symmetries of these novel 2D materials are artificially moulded to atomic precision via epitaxial growth. Over time, we also hope to translate these new solids into quantum device platforms.
Clearly there’s all sorts of exotic materials physics within that remit.
Correct. We form van der Waals heterostructures by epitaxial manipulation of the crystal lattice in diverse, atomically thin 2D materials – for example, 2D heterostructures incorporating graphene, boron nitride or transition-metal dichalcogenides (such as MoS2, WSe2, NbSe2, TaSe2 and so on). Crucially, the material layers are held in place only by weak van der Waals forces and with no dangling chemical bonds in the direction normal to the layers.
These 2D layers can also be laterally “stitched” into hexagonal or honeycomb lattices, with the electronic and atomic motions confined into the atomic layers. Using state-of-the-art epitaxial techniques, our team can then artificially stack these lattices to form a new class of condensed matter with exotic interlayer couplings and emergent electronic, optical and magnetic properties – properties that, we hope, will find applications in next-generation quantum devices.
Moon-Ho Jo “While the focus is very much on basic science, epitaxial scalability is hard-wired into all our lines of enquiry.” (Courtesy: IBS)
The IBS headquarters was established in 2011 as Korea’s first dedicated institute for fundamental science. It’s an umbrella organization coordinating the activity of 38 centres-of-excellence across the physical sciences, life sciences, as well as mathematics and data science. In this way, IBS specializes in long-range initiatives that require large groups of researchers from Korea and abroad.
Our IBS-VdWQS is a catalyst for advances in fundamental materials science and condensed-matter physics, essentially positioned as a central-government-funded research institution in a research-oriented university. Particularly important in this regard is our colocation on the campus of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), one of Korea’s leading academic centres, and our adjacency to large-scale facilities like the Pohang Synchrotron Radiation Facility (PAL) and Pohang X-ray free-electron laser (PAL-XFEL). It’s worth noting as well that all the principal investigators (PIs) in our centre hold dual positions as IBS researchers and POSTECH professors.
So IBS is majoring on strategic research initiatives?
Absolutely – and that perspective also underpins our funding model. The IBS-VdWQS was launched in 2022 and is funded by IBS for an initial period through to 2032 (with a series of six-year extensions subject to the originality and impact of our research). As such, we are able to encourage autonomy across our 2D materials programme, giving scientists the academic freedom to pursue questions in basic research without the bureaucracy and overhead of endless grant proposals. Team members know that, with plenty of hard work and creativity, they have everything they need here to do great science and build their careers.
Your core remit is fundamental science, but what technologies could eventually emerge from the IBS-VdWQS research programme?
While the focus is very much on basic science, epitaxial scalability is hard-wired into all our lines of enquiry. In short: we are creating new 2D materials via epitaxial growth and this ultimately opens a pathway to wafer-scale industrial production of van der Waals materials with commercially interesting semiconducting, superconducting or emergent properties in general.
Right now, we are investigating van der Waals semiconductors and the potential integration of MoS2 and WSe2 with silicon for new generations of low-power logic circuitry. On a longer timeline, we are developing new types of high-Tc (around 10 K) van der Waals superconductors for applications in Josephson junctions, which are core building blocks in superconducting quantum computers.
There’s a parallel opportunity in photonic quantum computing, with van der Waals materials shaping up as promising candidates for quantum light-emitters that generate on-demand (deterministic) and highly coherent (indistinguishable) single-photon streams.
Establishing a new research centre from scratch can’t have been easy. How are things progressing?
It’s been a busy three years since the launch of the IBS-VdWQS. The most important task at the outset was centralization – pulling together previously scattered resources, equipment and staff from around the POSTECH campus. We completed the move into our purpose-built facility, next door to the PAL synchrotron light source, at the end of last year and have now established dedicated laboratory areas for the van der Waals Epitaxy Division; Quantum Device and Optics Division; Quantum Device Fabrication Division; and the Imaging and Spectroscopy Division.
One of our front-line research efforts is building a van der Waals Quantum Solid Cluster, an integrated system of multiple instruments connected by ultra-high-vacuum lines to maintain atomically clean surfaces. We believe this advanced capability will allow us to reliably study air-sensitive van der Waals materials and open up opportunities to discover new physics in previously inaccessible van der Waals platforms.
Integrated thinking The IBS-VdWQS hosts an end-to-end research programme spanning advanced fabrication, materials characterization and theoretical studies. From left to right: vapour-phase van der Waals crystal growth; femtosecond laser spectroscopy for studying ultrafast charge, spin and lattice dynamics; and an STM system for investigations of electronic structure and local quantum properties in van der Waals materials. (Courtesy: IBS)
Are there plans to scale the IBS-VdWQS work programme?
Right now, my priority is to promote opportunities for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and research fellows to accelerate the centre’s expanding research brief. Diversity is strength, so I’m especially keen to encourage more in-bound applications from talented experimental and theoretical physicists in Europe and North America. Our current research cohort comprises 30+ PhD students, seven postdocs (from the US, India, China and Korea) and seven PIs.
Over the next five years, we aim to scale up to 25+ postdocs and research fellows and push out in new directions such as scalable quantum devices. In particular, we are looking for scientists with specialist know-how and expertise in areas like materials synthesis, quantum transport, optical spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy (SPM) to accelerate our materials research.
How do you support your early-career researchers at IBS-VdWQS?
We are committed to nurturing global early-career talent and provide a clear development pathway from PhD through postdoctoral studies to student research fellow and research fellow/PI. Our current staff PIs have diverse academic backgrounds – materials science, physics, electronic engineering and chemistry – and we therefore allow early-career scientists to have a nominated co-adviser alongside their main PI. This model means research students learn in an integrated fashion that encourages a “multidisciplinarian” mindset – majoring in epitaxial growth, low-temperature electronic devices and optical spectroscopy, say, while also maintaining a watching brief (through their co-adviser) on the latest advances in materials characterization and analysis.
What does success look like at the end of the current funding cycle?
With 2032 as the first milestone year in this budget cycle, we are working to establish a global hub for van der Waals materials science – a highly collaborative and integrated research programme spanning advanced fabrication, materials characterization/analysis and theoretical studies. More capacity, more research infrastructure, more international scientists are all key to delivering our development roadmap for 2D semiconductor and superconductor integration towards scalable, next-generation low-power electronics and quantum computing devices.
Myungchul Oh “We are exploring the microscopic nature of quantum materials and their device applications.” (Courtesy: IBS)
Myungchul Oh joined the IBS-VdWQS in 2023 after a five-year stint as a postdoctoral physicist at Princeton University in the US, where he studied strongly correlated phenomena, superconductivity and topological properties in “twisted” graphene systems.
Recruited as an IBS-POSTECH research fellow, Oh holds dual academic positions: team leader for the quantum-device microscopy investigations at IBS-VdWQS and assistant professor in the semiconductor engineering department at POSTECH.
Van der Waals heterostructures, assembled layer-by-layer from 2D materials, enable precise engineering of quantum properties through the interaction between different atomic layers. By extension, Oh and his colleagues are focused on the development of novel van der Waals systems; their integration into devices via nanofabrication; and the study of electrical, magnetic and topological properties under extreme conditions, where quantum-mechanical effects dominate.
“We are exploring the microscopic nature of quantum materials and their device applications,” Oh explains. “Our research combines novel 2D van der Waals heterostructure device fabrication techniques with cryogenic scanning probe microscopy (SPM) measurements – the latter to access the atomic-scale electronic structure and local physical properties of quantum phases in 2D materials.”
Atoms in a one-dimensional quantum gas behave like a Newton’s cradle toy, transferring energy from atom to atom without dissipation. Developed by researchers at the TU Wien, Austria, this quantum fluid of ultracold, confined rubidium atoms can be used to simulate more complex solid-state systems. By measuring transport quantities within this “perfect” atomic system, the team hope to obtain a deeper understanding of how transport phenomena and thermodynamics behave at the quantum level.
Physical systems transport energy, charge and mass in various ways. Electrical currents streaming along a wire, heat flowing through a solid and light travelling down an optical fibre are just three examples. How easily these quantities move inside a material depends on the resistance they experience, with collisions and friction slowing them down and making them fade away. This level of resistance largely determines whether the material is classed as an insulator, a conductor or a superconductor.
The mechanisms behind such transport fall into two main categories. The first is ballistic transport, which features linear movement without loss, like a bullet travelling in a straight line. The second is diffusive transport, where the quantity is subject to many random collisions. A good example is heat conduction, where the heat moves through a material gradually, travelling in many directions at once.
Breaking the rules
Most systems are strongly affected by diffusion, which makes it surprising that the TU Wien researchers could build an atomic system where mass and energy flowed freely without it. According to study leader Frederik Møller, the key to this unusual behaviour is the magnetic and optical fields that keep the rubidium atoms confined to one dimension, “freezing out” interactions in the atoms’ two transverse directions.
Because the atoms can only move along a single direction, Møller explains, they transfer momentum perfectly, without scattering their energy as would be the case in normal matter. Consequently, the 1D atomic system does not thermalize despite being subject to thousands of collisions.
To quantify the transport of mass (charge) and energy within this system, the researchers measured quantities known as Drude weights, which are fundamental parameters that describe ballistic, dissipationless transport in solid-state environments. According to these measurements, the single-dimensional interacting bosonic atoms do indeed demonstrate perfect dissipationless transport. The results also agree with the generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) theoretical framework, which describes the large-scale, inhomogeneous dynamics of one-dimensional integrable quantum many-body systems such as ultracold atomic gases or specific spin chains.
A Newton’s cradle for atoms
According to team leader Jörg Schmiedmayer, the experiment is analogous to a Newton’s cradle toy, which consists of a row of metal balls suspended on wires (see below). When the ball on one end of the row is made to collide with the one next to it, its momentum transfers straight through the other balls to the ball on the opposite end, which swings out. Schmiedmayer adds that the system makes it possible to study transport under perfectly controlled conditions and could open new ways of understanding how resistance emerges, or disappears, at the quantum level. “Our next steps are applying the method to strongly correlated transport and to transport in a topological fluid,” he tells Physics World.
Karèn Kheruntsyan, a theoretical physicist at the University of Queensland, Australia, who was not involved in this research, calls it “a significant step for studying quantum transport”. He says the team’s work clearly demonstrates ballistic (dissipationless) transport at a finite temperature, providing an experimental benchmark for theories of integrability and disorder. The work also validates the thermodynamic meaning of Drude weights, while confirming that linear-response theory and GHD accurately describe transport in quantum systems.
In Kheruntsyan’s view, though, the team’s biggest achievement is the quantitative extraction of Drude weights that characterize atomic and energy currents, with “excellent agreement” between experiment and theory. This, he says, shows truly ballistic transport in an interacting many-body system. One caveat, though, is that the system’s limited spatial resolution and near-ideal integrability prevent it from being used to explore diffusive regimes or stronger interaction effects, leaving microscopic dynamics such as dispersive shock waves unresolved.
Science Corporation, founded by Neuralink’s first president, Max Hodak, has unveiled a prototype machine to extend the life of organs for longer periods.
Physics students from under-represented groups consistently report a lower sense of belonging at university than their over-represented peers. These students experience specific challenges that make them feel undervalued and excluded. Yet a strong sense of belonging has been shown to lead to improved academic performance, greater engagement in courses and better mental wellbeing. It is vital, then, that universities make changes to help eliminate these challenges.
Students are uniquely placed to describe the issues when it comes to belonging in physics. With this mind, as an undergraduate physics student with a passion for making the discipline more diverse and inclusive, I conducted focus groups with current and former physics students, interviewed experts and performed an analysis of current literature. This was part of a summer project funded by the Royal Institution and is currently being finalized for publication.
From this work it became clear that under-represented groups face many challenges to developing a strong sense of belonging in physics, but, at the same time, there are ways to improve the everyday experiences of students. When it comes to barriers, one is the widely held belief – reflected in the way physicists are depicted in the media and textbooks – that you need to be a “natural genius” to succeed in university physics. This notion hampers students from under-represented groups, who see peers from the over-represented majority appearing to grasp concepts more quickly and lecturers suggesting certain topics are “easy”.
The feeling that physics demands natural ability also arises from the so-called “weed out” culture, which is defined as courses that are intentionally designed to filter students out, reduce class sizes and diminish sense of belonging. Students who we surveyed believe that the high fail rate is caused by a disconnect between the teaching and workshops on the course and the final exam.
A third cause of this perception that you need some innate ability to succeed in physics is the attitudes and behaviour of some professors, lecturers and demonstrators. This includes casual sexist and racist behaviour; belittling students who ask for help; and acting as if they’re uninterested in teaching. Students from under-represented groups report significantly lower levels of respect and recognition from instructors, which damages their resilience and weakens sense of belonging.
Students from under-represented groups are also more likely to be isolated from their class mates and feel socially excluded from them. This means they lack a support network, leaving them with no-one to turn to when they encounter challenges. Outside the lecture theatre, students from under-represented groups typically face many microaggressions in their day-to-day university experience. These are subtle indignities or insults, unconsciously or consciously, towards minorities such as people of colour being told they “speak English very well”, male students refusing to accept women’s ideas, and the assumption that gender minorities will take on administrative roles in group projects.
Focus on the future
So what can be done? The good news is that there are many solutions to mitigate these issues and improve a sense of belonging. First, institutions should place more emphasis on small group “active learning” – which includes discussions, problem solving and peer-based learning. These pedagogical strategies have been shown to boost belonging, particularly for female students. After these active-learning sessions, non-academic, culturally sensitive social lunches can help turn “course friends” to “real friends” who choose to meet socially and can become a support network. This can help build connections within and between degree cohorts.
Another solution is for universities to invite former students to speak about their sense of belonging and how it evolved or improved throughout their degree. Hearing about struggles and learning tried-and-tested strategies to improve resilience can help students better prepare for stressful situations. Alumni are more relatable than generic messaging from the university wellbeing team.
Building closer links between students and staff also enhances a sense of belonging. It helps humanise lecturers and demonstrate that staff care about student wellbeing and success. This should be implemented by recognizing staff efforts formally so that the service roles of faculty members are formally recognized and professionalized.
Universities should also focus on hiring more diverse teaching staff, who can serve as role models, using their experiences to relate to and engage with under-represented students. Students will end up feeling more embedded within the physics community, improving both their sense of belonging and performance.
One practical way to increase diversity in hiring is for institutions to re-evaluate what they value. While securing large grants is valuable, so is advocating for equality, diversity and inclusion; public engagement; and the ability to inspire the next generation of physicists.
Another approach is to establish “departmental action teams” to find tailored solutions to unite undergraduates, postgraduates, teaching and research staff. Such teams identify issues specific to their particular university, and they can gather data through surveying the department to identify trends and recommend practical changes to boost belonging.
Implementing these measures will not only improve the sense of belonging for students from under-represented groups but also cultivate a more inclusive, diverse physics workforce. That in turn will boost the overall research culture, opening up research directions that may have previously been overlooked, and yielding stronger scientific outputs. It is crucial that we do more to support physics students from under-represented groups to create a more diverse physics community. Ultimately, it will benefit physics and society as a whole.
The gyromagnetic ratio is the ratio of a particle’s magnetic moment and its angular momentum. This value determines how a particle responds to a magnetic field. According to classical physics, muons should have a gyromagnetic ratio equal to 2. However, owing to quantum mechanics, there is a small difference between the expected gyromagnetic ratio and the observed value. This discrepancy is known as the anomalous magnetic moment.
The anomalous magnetic moment is incredibly sensitive to quantum fluctuations. It can be used to test the Standard Model of physics, and previous consistent experimental discrepancies have hinted at new physics beyond the Standard Model. The search for the anomalous magnetic moment is one of the most precise tests in modern physics.
To calculate the anomalous magnetic moment, experiments such as Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment have been set up where researchers measure the muon’s wobble frequency, which is caused by its magnetic moment. But effects such as hadronic vacuum polarization and hadronic light-by-light scattering cause uncertainty in the measurement. Unlike hadronic vacuum polarization, hadronic light-by-light cannot be directly extracted from experimental cross-section data, making it dependent on the model used and a significant computational challenge.
In this work, the researcher took a major step in resolving the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Their method calculated how the neutral pion contributes to hadronic light-by-light scattering, used domain wall fermions to preserve symmetry, employed eight different lattice configurations with variational pion masses, and introduced a pion structure function to find the key contributions in a model-independent method. The pion transition form factor was computed directly at arbitrary space-like photon momenta, and a Gegenbauer expansion was used to confirm that about 98% of the π⁰-pole contribution was determined in a model-independent way. The analysis also included finite-volume corrections and chiral and continuum extrapolations and yielded a value for the π⁰ decay width.
The development of a more accurate and model-independent anomalous magnetic moment for the muon has reduced major theoretical uncertainties and can make Standard Model precision tests more robust.
Entanglement is a phenomenon where two or more particles become linked in such a way that a measurement on one of the particles instantly influences the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics, which is key to all quantum technologies and remains a serious challenge to realize in large systems.
However, a team of researchers from Sweden and Spain has recently made a large step forward in the field of ultrafast entanglement. Here, pairs of extreme ultraviolet pulses are used to exert quantum control on the attosecond timescale (a few quintillionths of a second).
Specifically, they studied ultrafast photoionisation. In this process, a high-energy light pulse hits an atom, ejecting an electron and leaving behind an ion.
This process can create entanglement between the electron and the ion in a controlled way. However, the entanglement is fragile and can be disrupted or transferred as the system evolves.
For instance, as the newly-created ion emits a photon to release energy, the entanglement shifts from the electron – ion pair to the electron–photon pair. This transfer process takes a considerable amount of time, on the scale of 10s of nanoseconds. This means that the ion-electron pair is macroscopically separated, on the centimetre scale.
The team found that during this transition, all three particles – electron, ion, and photon – are entangled together in a multipartite state.
They did this by using a mathematical tool called von Neumann entropy to track how much information is shared between all three particles.
Although this work was purely theoretical, they also proposed an experimental method to study entanglement transfer. The setup would use two synchronised free-electron laser pulses, with attosecond precision, to measure the electron’s energy and to detect if a photon was emitted. By measuring both particles in coincidence, entanglement can be detected.
The results could be generalised to other scenarios and will help us understand how quantum information can move between different particles. This brings us one small step closer to future technologies like quantum communication and computing.
Luxembourg-based OQ Technology said Dec. 17 it has connected a commercial IoT chipset directly to one of its LEO satellites, using internally developed software based on 3GPP mobile standards.
Digantara Industries, an Indian space situational awareness company, has raised $50 million as it expands into the United States and pursues opportunities in missile defense.
Learn how environmental constraints and a lack of soil led ancient bees to reuse fossil cavities in a Caribbean cave, leaving the first known evidence of this behavior.
Learn how decades of research suggest that everyday patterns in how people cope, organize their lives, and respond to stress may quietly shape long-term health.
Connexion
