EchoStar has delayed a potential bankruptcy filing to allow more time for talks with regulators reviewing whether the satellite operator is complying with conditions tied to its spectrum licenses.
June 27, 2025 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Starcloud and Volta Space Technologies as new Associate Members. These forward-looking companies bring cutting-edge capabilities that […]
We live in a brand new era for lunar activities. With over 100 payloads from around the globe planned to visit the Moon by 2030, our closest natural satellite will […]
Jodrell Bank was established in 1945 in Cheshire in northwest England by the English radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, who became the observatory’s first director, a position he held until 1980.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank was built in 1957, and at 76.2 m in diameter was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world. That year it also became the only instrument capable of tracking the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 rocket.
The Lovell Telescope was originally known as the “250 ft telescope” before becoming the Mark I telescope around 1961 and then in 1987 was renamed the Lovell Telescope.
It was given a Heritage Grade I listing in 1988 and in 2019 Jodrell Bank was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
To the next level
The LEGO model has been designed by Manchester’s undergraduate physics society and is based on the telescope’s original engineering blueprints. Student James Ruxton spent six months perfecting the design, which even involved producing custom-designed LEGO bricks with a 3D printer.
Ruxton and fellow students began construction in April and the end result is a model weighing 30 kg with 30 500 pieces and a whopping 4000-page instruction manual.
“It’s definitely the biggest and most challenging build I’ve ever done, but also the most fun,” says Ruxton. “I’ve been a big fan of LEGO since I was younger, and I’ve always loved creating my own models, so recreating something as iconic as the Lovell is like taking that to the next level!”
The model will now go on display in a “specially modified cabinet” at the university’s Schuster building. It will take pride of place alongside a decade-old LEGO model of CERN’s ATLAS detector.
“Jodrell Bank has always been a symbol of bold innovation – pushing the boundaries of science and engineering from its earliest days,” notes particle physicist Chris Parkes, who is head of physics and astronomy at Manchester. “What the students have created with this Lego build is a perfect reflection of that spirit. It’s not just a model; it’s a celebration of Manchester’s history of discovery and a testament to the creativity, precision, and ambition that continue to define our scientific community today.”
Power engineering: Multilayered films developed by Peak Nano can improve the performance and resilience of high-voltage capacitors that manage the flow of electricity around power grids (Courtesy: shutterstock/jakit17)
Grid operators around the world are under intense pressure to expand and modernize their power networks. The International Energy Authority predicts that demand for electricity will rise by 30% in this decade alone, fuelled by global economic growth and the ongoing drive towards net zero. At the same time, electrical transmission systems must be adapted to handle the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, as well as the extreme and unpredictable weather conditions that are being triggered by climate change.
High-voltage capacitors play a crucial role in these power networks, balancing the electrical load and managing the flow of current around the grid. For more than 40 years, the standard dielectric for storing energy in these capacitors has been a thin film of a polymer material called biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP). However, as network operators upgrade their analogue-based infrastructure with digital technologies such as solid-state transformers and high-frequency switches, BOPP struggles to provide the thermal resilience and reliability that are needed to ensure the stability, scalability and security of the grid.
“We’re trying to bring innovation to an area that hasn’t seen it for a very long time,” says Dr Mike Ponting, Chief Scientific Officer of Peak Nano, a US firm specializing in advanced polymer materials. “Grid operators have been using polypropylene materials for a generation, with no improvement in capability or performance. It’s time to realize we can do better.”
Peak Nano has created a new capacitor film technology that address the needs of the digital power grid, as well as other demanding energy storage applications such as managing the power supply to data centres, charging solutions for electric cars, and next-generation fusion energy technology. The company’s Peak NanoPlex™ materials are fabricated from multiple thin layers of different polymer materials, and can be engineered to deliver enhanced performance for both electrical and optical applications. The capacitor films typically contain polymer layers anywhere between 32 and 156 nm thick, while the optical materials are fabricated with as many as 4000 layers in films thinner than 300 µm.
“When they are combined together in an ordered, layered structure, the long polymer molecules behave and interact with each other in different ways,” explains Ponting. “By putting the right materials together, and controlling the precise arrangement of the molecules within the layers, we can engineer the film properties to achieve the performance characteristics needed for each application.”
In the case of capacitor films, this process enhances BOPP’s properties by interleaving it with another polymer. Such layered films can be optimized to store four times the energy as conventional BOPP while achieving extremely fast charge/discharge rates. Alternatively, they can be engineered to deliver longer lifetimes at operating temperatures some 50–60°C higher than existing materials. Such improved thermal resilience is useful for applications that experience more heat, such as mining and aerospace, and is also becoming an important priority for grid operators as they introduce new transmission technologies that generate more heat.
On a roll: NanoPlex films are made from ultrathin layers of polymer materials (Courtesy: Peak Nano)
“We talked to the users of the components to find out what they needed, and then adjusted our formulations to meet those needs,” says Ponting. “Some people wanted smaller capacitors that store a lot of energy and can be cycled really fast, while others wanted an upgraded version of BOPP that is more reliable at higher temperatures.”
The multilayered materials now being produced by Peak Nano emerged from research Ponting was involved in while he was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in the 2000s, where Ponting was a graduate student. Plastics containing just a few layers had originally been developed for everyday applications like gift wrap and food packaging, but scientists were starting to explore the novel optical and electronic properties that emerge when the thickness of the polymer layers is reduced to the nanoscale regime.
Small samples of these polymer nanocomposites produced in the lab demonstrated their superior performance, and Peak Nano was formed in 2016 to commercialize the technology and scale up the fabrication process. “There was a lot of iteration and improvement to produce large quantities of the material while still maintaining the precision and repeatability of the nanostructured layers,” says Ponting, who has been developing these multilayered polymer materials and the required processing technology for more than 20 years. “The film properties we want to achieve require the polymer molecules to be well ordered, and it took us a long time to get it right.”
As part of this development process, Peak Nano worked with capacitor manufacturers to create a plug-and-play replacement technology for BOPP that can be used on the same manufacturing systems and capacitor designs as BOPP today. By integrating its specialist layering technology into these existing systems, Peak Nano has been able to leverage established supply chains for materials and equipment rather than needing to develop a bespoke manufacturing process. “That has helped to keep costs down, which means that our layered material is only slightly more expensive than BOPP,” says Ponting.
Ponting also points out that long term, NanoPlex is a more cost-effective option. With improved reliability and resilience, NanoPlex can double or even quadruple the lifetime of a component. “The capacitors don’t need to be replaced as often, which reduces the need for downtime and offsets the slightly higher cost,” he says.
For component manufacturers, meanwhile, the multilayered films can be used in exactly the same way as conventional materials. “Our material can be wound into capacitors using the same process as for polypropylene,” says Ponting. “Our customers don’t need to change their process; they just need to design for higher performance.”
Initial interest in the improved capabilities of NanoPlex came from the defence sector, with Peak Nano benefiting from investment and collaborative research with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Naval Research Laboratory. Optical films produced by the company have been used to fabricate lenses with a graduated refractive index, reducing the size and weight of head-mounted visual equipment while also sharpening the view. Dielectric films with a high breakdown voltage are also a common requirement within the defence community.
A computational paradigm that can accurately simulate interactions between powerful laser beams and quantum fluctuations in a vacuum has been unveiled by researchers in the UK and Portugal. Led by Lily Zhang at the University of Oxford, the team hopes that their solver could lead to important new insights into the quantum nature of the vacuum.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a detailed picture of how light and matter interact, and has withstood decades of experimental scrutiny. So far, however, evidence for one of the theory’s key predictions about the nature of the vacuum has remained elusive.
Far from being empty, the vacuum contains a sea of virtual particles that are associated with quantum fluctuations. These particle–antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop into existence before annihilating almost instantly.
QED predicts that virtual particles create nonlinearities within the vacuum that can interact with powerful laser pulses. Underlying this effect is photon–photon scattering, something that particle physicists have tried to observe for several decades in accelerator experiments.
Powerful lasers
“So far, there has been no successful direct tests of photon–photon scattering,” Zhang explains. “However, the global emergence of multi-petawatt lasers has rekindled interest in testing the vacuum using just light itself.” For these experiments to succeed, robust analytical tools which can model the quantum vacuum’s responses to such immensely powerful lasers will be crucial.
So far, researchers have used computational tools that can only model simplified laser setups using 2D models. Zhang’s team addressed these limitations using a numerical technique called the Yee scheme. This is used to solve Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and is already widely used in plasma simulation. The method works by separately calculating electric and magnetic fields at staggered times and positions, ensuring greater stability and accuracy.
“The key challenge here is the nonlinear terms, which depend on the electromagnetic fields themselves,” Zhang explains. “We addressed this by combining the Yee scheme with an iterative loop that updates the nonlinear response at each time step until the solution converges.” Once integrated with a state-of-the-art plasma simulation code, the team was left with a fully 3D solver, capable of simulating arbitrary laser interactions within a vacuum.
To test their platform’s performance, they benchmarked it against existing theoretical predictions of vacuum birefringence, which is an effect triggered when a vacuum is distorted by and intense laser pulse that “pumps” the vacuum. In the context of photon–photon scattering, QED predicts that that these distortions will cause the light in a weaker probe beam to split into two separate rays, each with a different polarization and refractive index.
In addition, the team extended their solver to modelling four-wave mixing, which is a more complex effect whereby three input light beams interact in a vacuum to generate a fourth beam.
Tracking asymmetries
“The real-time simulation capability allowed us to track the evolving properties of this output signal, including its size, intensity, and duration, and link these to physical conditions at earlier stages of the interaction,” Zhang explains. “For instance, asymmetries in the signal beam were traced back to asymmetries in the interaction region, which is clearly observable from the simulation data.”
Just as the team hoped, their simulations of birefringence and four-wave mixing both closely matched their theoretical predictions – clearly showcasing their platform’s advanced capabilities.
For now, Zhang and colleagues hope that their solver could vastly reduce the computing resources required to develop robust 3D simulations of laser–vacuum interactions, making them far more efficient and accessible in turn. With its high flexibility in simulating arbitrary laser configurations, the team is now confident that their platform could soon be used to studying a diverse array of quantum vacuum effects – including birefringence, four-wave mixing, and many others.
“Looking ahead, we’re using the solver to explore new regimes, including novel beam profiles and exotic field interactions,” Zhang says. “Its structure also allows for easy extension to other nonlinear theories, such as Born–Infeld electrodynamics and axion-like particle fields. Ultimately, our goal is to create a versatile simulation platform for probing fundamental physics in the quantum vacuum.”
Superfluorescence is a collective quantum phenomenon in which many excited particles emit light coherently in a sudden, intense burst. It is usually only observed at cryogenic temperatures, but researchers in the US and France have now determined how and why superfluorescence occurs at room temperature in a lead halide perovskite. The work could help in the development of materials that host exotic coherent quantum states – like superconductivity, superfluidity or superfluorescence – under ambient conditions, they say.
Superfluorescence and other collective quantum phenomena are rapidly destroyed at temperatures higher than cryogenic ones because of thermal vibrations produced in the crystal lattice. In the system studied in this work, the researchers, led by physicist Kenan Gundogdu of North Carolina State University, found that excitons (bound electron–hole pairs) spontaneously form localized, coherence-preserving domains. “These solitons act like quantum islands,” explains Gundogdu. “Excitons inside these islands remain coherent while those outside rapidly dephase.”
The soliton structure acts as a shield, he adds, protecting its content from thermal disturbances – a behaviour that represents a kind of quantum analogue of “soundproofing” – that is, isolation from vibrations. “Here, coherence is maintained not by external cooling but by intrinsic self-organization,” he says.
Intense, time-delayed bursts of coherent emission
The team, which also includes researchers from Duke University, Boston University and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, began their experiment by exciting lead halide perovskite samples with intense femtosecond laser pulses to generate a dense population of excitons in the material. Under normal conditions, these excitons recombine and emit light incoherently, but at high enough densities, as was the case here, the researchers observed intense, time-delayed bursts of coherent emission, which is a signature of superfluorescence.
When they analysed how the emission evolved over time, the researchers observed that it fluctuated. Surprisingly, these fluctuations were not random, explains Gundogdu, but were modulated by a well-defined frequency, corresponding to a specific lattice vibrational mode. “This suggested that the coherent excitons that emit superfluorescence come from a region in the lattice in which the lattice modes themselves oscillate in synchrony.”
So how can coherent lattice oscillations arise in a thermally disordered environment? The answer involves polarons, says Gundogdu. These are groups of excitons that locally deform the lattice. “Above a critical excitation density, these polarons self-organize into a soliton, which concentrates energy into specific vibrational modes while suppressing others. This process filters out incoherent lattice motion, allowing a stable collective oscillation to emerge.”
The new work, which is detailed in Nature, builds on a previous study in which the researchers had observed superfluorescence in perovskites at room temperature – an unexpected result. They suspected that an intrinsic effect was protecting excitons from dephasing – possibly through a quantum analogue of vibration isolation as mentioned – but the mechanism behind this was unclear.
In this latest experiment, the team determined how polarons can self-organize into soliton states, and revealed an unconventional form of superfluorescence where coherence emerges intrinsically inside solitons. This coherence protection mechanism might be extended to other macroscopic quantum phenomena such as superconductivity and superfluidity.
“These effects are foundational for quantum technologies, yet how coherence survives at high temperatures is still unresolved,” Gundogdu tells Physics World. “Our findings provide a new principle that could help close this knowledge gap and guide the design of more robust, high-temperature quantum systems.”
The outcome of the review could impact the procurement of as many as 140 satellites for the Space Development Agency's Transport Layer Tranche 3 program
IRVINE, Calif. – June 26, 2025 – Terran Orbital Corporation, a leading manufacturer of satellite products for the aerospace and defense industry, is proud to announce the adoption of a […]
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Hannah Earley, a mathematician and physicist who is chief technical officer and co-founder of Vaire Computing.
The company is developing hardware for reversible computing, a paradigm with the potential to reduce significantly the energy required to do computations – which could be a boon for power-hungry applications like artificial intelligence.
In a conversation with Physics World’s Margaret Harris, Earley talks about the physics, engineering and commercialization of reversible computing. They also chat about the prototype chips that Vaire is currently working on and the company’s plans for the future.
In this week’s episode of Space Minds David Ariosto sits down Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute who explains why the Red Planet may hold answers about extraterrestrial life as well as our own origins.
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