It wasn’t until the second year of my undergraduate degree that someone finally put a name to why I’d been struggling with day-to-day things throughout my life – it was Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It explained so much; my extreme anxiety around work and general life, my poor time management, the problems I had regulating my emotions, and my inability to manage everyday tasks. Being able to put a label on it, and therefore start taking steps to mitigate the worst of its symptoms, was a real turning point in my life.

As such, when I started my PhD at the Quantum Engineering Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Bristol, I got on the (notoriously long) waiting list for an assessment and formal diagnosis. I knew that because of my ADHD, my PhD journey would look a little different compared to the average student, and that I’d have to work harder in some aspects to mitigate the consequences of my symptoms.

People with ADHD exhibit a persistent pattern of inattention, hyperactivity and/or impulsivity that interferes with day-to-day life. It is a type of neurodivergence – when someone’s brain functions in a different way to what is considered “typical”. Other neurodivergent conditions include autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia, but the term also encompasses mental-health issues, learning difficulties and acquired neurodivergence (for example, after a brain injury).

According to Genius Within, at least 5% of the population have ADHD, 1–2% are autistic, 14% have mental health needs, and many more have other neurodevelopmental conditions. It is also common for those with one neurodivergence to have one or more other co-occurring neurodivergent conditions.

However, if you look specifically at the scientific community, these percentages are much higher. For example, in a 2024 survey “Designing Neuroinclusive Laboratory Environments” run by HOK, it was found that out of 241 individuals, 18.6% had ADHD and 25.5% were autistic. If neurodivergent people remain highly overrepresented in the sciences, then it is imperative that we understand and accommodate for the needs of these individuals in work and research environments.

Spiky skills

One common trait among neurodivergent people is that they have greater strengths and bigger weaknesses across skillsets when compared to neurotypical people. This is known as having a “spiky profile” – it appears as peaks and troughs above and below a “normal” baseline (figure 1). The skillsets commonly included in a profile are analytical, mathematical, motor, situational and organizational skills; relationship management; sensory sensitivities; processing speed; verbal and visual comprehension; and working memory. So while neurodivergent people may be extremely capable at certain skills, they may really struggle with others.

Personally, I have problems with working memory, organization and processing speed, but each of these issues present differently in certain situations. For example, it’s not uncommon for me to reach the end of a meeting with my supervisor and feel that I understand all that was discussed and have no questions – but then I may come up with some important queries sometime later that didn’t occur to me at the time. This demonstrates a difference in processing speed, which thankfully can be accommodated for by maintaining an open line of communication between myself and my supervisors.

Meanwhile, for Daisy Shearer – who leads the outreach and education programme at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) in the UK – their autism affects their day-to-day life in other ways. “I experience sensory inputs and emotion regulation differently to neurotypical people, which uses a lot of energy to manage,” Shearer explains. “My executive functioning skills [those that help you manage everyday tasks] tend to be poor, as well as my social skills, which I work hard to overcome.”

Despite our different neurotypes, Shearer and I also have some symptoms in common. For example, we both struggle with switching between tasks, and time blindness, which means we have difficulty in perceiving and managing time. But while many traits can overlap between neurotypes in this way, even two individuals with the same diagnosis won’t have the exact same symptoms or profile.

Abilities and sensitivities can fluctuate day-to-day or even hour-to-hour, regardless of the accommodations and strategies in place

Furthermore, neurodivergent people can be “dynamically disabled”, meaning that our abilities and sensitivities fluctuate day-to-day or even hour-to-hour, regardless of  the accommodations and strategies in place. Shearer, for instance, used to be primarily lab-based and would find that environment soothing, but occasionally the lab would become overwhelming when their sensory profile shifted.

Meanwhile for me, one day I may be able to focus and complete multiple large tasks in a day, attend various meetings and answer e-mails in a timely fashion. But on another day – sometimes even the next day – I may only be able to answer half of my e-mails and will flit between tasks, unable to focus deeply on any one thing. This can make monitoring progress and completing milestones difficult, and requires a high degree of flexibility and understanding from those around me.

Accommodating the troughs

So what can the physics community do to help people who are neurodivergent like myself? While we absolutely don’t want to be treated leniently – we want our work as physicists to be as high a standard as anyone else’s – working with individuals to accommodate them correctly is key to helping them succeed.

That’s why in 2019 Shearer founded Neuroinclusion in STEM, after having no openly autistic role models in their physics career to date. The project, which is community-driven, aims to increase the visibility of neurodivergent people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and provide information on best practices to make the fields more inclusive.

Shearer also takes part in many equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committees, and gives talks at conferences to highlight how the STEM community can improve the working environment for its neurodivergent members.

Indeed, Shearer’s own set up at the NQCC is a great example of workplace accommodations helping an employee thrive. Firstly, Shearer had a high level of autonomy in defining their role when they joined the NQCC. “It was incredibly helpful when it comes to managing how my brain works,” they explain. Shearer also has the flexibility to work from home if they’re feeling particularly sensory sensitive, and were consulted in the design of the NQCC’s “wellbeing room” – a fully sensorily controllable space that they can use during their work day when feeling overwhelmed by sensory stimuli. Other, small adjustments that have helped include having an allocated desk away from general people-traffic, and colleagues being educated to ensure a more inclusive environment.

For physicists working in a lab – dependent on health and safety measures – it can help to wear headphones or earplugs and have dimmable lights to minimize sensory inputs. Some neurodivergent people also benefit from visual aids and written instructions for experiments and equipment. Personally, as a theorist in an office, I find noise cancelling headphones, and asking colleagues to consider e-mailing rather than interrupting me at my desk, can help reduce distractions.

Reaching the peak

While education and accommodations are key, it’s also important to remember the strengths that come with having a neurodivergent spiky profile – the peaks, so to speak. “I have strong analytical, communication and creative skills,” explains Shearer, “which make me very good at what I do professionally.”

For me, I excel in visual, written and communication skills, and try to use these to my advantage. I’m good at spotting errors in mine and others’ work, I’m a concise but detailed writer, and when not working on my PhD, I’m trying to communicate complex ideas in quantum physics to different audiences with varying degrees of understanding of physics and science.

By recognizing all of our unique capabilities and adequately accommodating those additional neurodivergent struggles, we can build systems that empower instead of limit us

Reminding myself of these strengths is key, as it can be too easy to focus on the negatives that come with being neurodivergent. By recognizing all of our unique capabilities and adequately accommodating those additional neurodivergent struggles, we can build systems that empower instead of limit us.

I believe Shearer put this best: “By embracing our individual strengths, we can enable everyone to thrive in their professional and personal lives, but that can only come with understanding how to accommodate each other.”

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A team of researchers in Sweden has demonstrated how smart optical metasurfaces can respond far more strongly to incoming light when switched to their conducting states. By fine-tuning the spacing between arrays of nanoantennae on a polymer metasurface, Magnus Jonsson and colleagues at Linköping University were able to generate nonlocal electromagnetic coupling between the antennae – vastly strengthening the metasurface’s optical responses.

Metasurfaces are rapidly emerging as a key component of smart optical devices, which can dynamically manipulate the wavefronts and spectral signals of incoming light. “They work in a way that nanostructures are placed in patterns on a flat surface and become receivers for light,” Jonsson explains. “Each receiver, or antenna, captures the light in a certain way and together these nanostructures allow the light to be controlled as you desire.”

One promising route towards such intelligent metasurfaces is to fabricate their antennae from conducting polymers, such as PEDOT. In such materials, the intrinsic permittivity – which determines how the material responds to electric fields, such as those from incoming light – can be manually switched by altering the oxidation state through a redox reaction. This, in turn, modifies the polymer’s carrier density and mobility, altering the number and behaviour of mobile charge carriers that contribute to its optical properties.

A key measure of how well these materials resonate with light is the “quality factor”, which describes how sharp and long-lived a resonance is. A higher quality factor signifies a stronger, more precise interaction with light, while a lower value indicates weaker and broader responses.

When PEDOT is in its metallic oxidation state, incident light will drive the resonance of surface plasmons: collective oscillations of mobile charges that are confined near the surface of the material. At specific wavelengths, these plasmons can strongly enhance electromagnetic fields – altering properties including the phase, amplitude and spectral composition of the light reflected and transmitted by the metasurface.

Alternatively, when PEDOT is switched to its insulating state, the resulting lack of available charge carriers will significantly suppress surface plasmon formation, leading to diminished optical response.

In principle, this effect offers a useful way to modulate the nanoantennae of smart metasurfaces via redox reactions. So far, however, the surface plasmons generated through this approach have only resonated weakly in response to incident light, and have quickly lost their energy after excitation – even when the polymer is switched to its metallic state. This has made the approach impractical for use in smart, switchable metasurfaces that require strong and coherent plasmonic behaviour.

Jonsson’s team addressed this problem by considering the spacing of PEDOT nanoantennae within periodic arrays. When separated at precisely the right distance, the array generated nonlocal coupling through coherent diffractive interactions – involving the constructive interference of light scattered by each antenna.

As a result, this arrangement supported collective lattice resonances (CLRs) – in which entire arrays of nanoantennae respond collectively and coherently to incident light. This drastically boosted the strength and sharpness of the material’s plasmonic response, boosting its quality factor by up to ten times that of previous conducting polymer nanoantennae. Such high-quality resonances indicate more coherent, longer-lived plasmonic modes.

As before, the researchers could manually switch the nanoantenna array between metallic and insulating states via redox reactions, which reversibly weakened its plasmonic responses as required. This dynamic tuning offers a pathway towards electrically or chemically programmable optical behaviour.

Based on this performance, Jonsson’s team is now confident that this approach could have promising implications for the future of smart optical metasurfaces. “We show that metasurfaces made of conducting polymers seem to be able to provide sufficiently high performance to be relevant for practical applications,” says co-author Dongqing Lin.

For now, the researchers have demonstrated their approach across mid-infrared wavelengths. But with some further tweaks to their fabrication process, allowing for closer spacings between the nanoantennae and smaller antenna sizes, they aim to generate CLRs in the visible spectrum. If achieved, this could open up new opportunities for smart optical metasurfaces in cutting-edge optical applications as wide-ranging as holography, invisibility cloaking and biomedical imaging.

The study is described in Nature Communications.

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I recently heard a physicist jocularly remind us that “All science is either physics or stamp collecting”. Widely attributed to the Nobel prize-winning nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford, this quotation is often interpreted as the pre-eminence of physics over other scientific disciplines. While there is some doubt about whether Rutherford actually uttered that phrase, what’s interesting for me is not its origins but why the statement has – or ought to have – little place in today’s world.

In an era of rapid technological advancement and complex global challenges, it has never been more important for the scientific community to work together. From tackling climate change and dealing with the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence to exploring space and ensuring everyone has advanced and accessible healthcare, we need experts from different disciplines to work together. No single domain can comprehensively address such challenges.

That’s why all of us in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) need to work together collectively and with one voice. Fortunately, there are many examples of where this already occurs. Biomedical engineering, for example, has seen physicists, chemists, biologists, material scientists and medical experts develop many successful innovations, such as prosthetics, joint implants, artificial organs and advanced imaging technologies.

The development of machine learning algorithms for healthcare applications, meanwhile, requires computer scientists, statisticians and medical professionals. By embracing collaboration, the strengths of multiple disciplines can be exploited to drive innovation and create solutions that would be difficult – and sometimes even impossible – to achieve in isolation

Sharing knowledge

Without such collaboration, any solution would be incomplete and likely impractical. By working together, STEMM professionals are creating holistic solutions that address our technical, environmental and societal needs. However, it’s vital that we share knowledge and expertise so that STEMM professionals can learn from one another and build on existing work.

In today’s ever-changing world, staying informed about the latest developments is critical. Collaborative efforts ensure that knowledge is disseminated quickly and efficiently, thereby reducing duplication of effort and speeding up progress. It also fosters creativity by encouraging individuals to think beyond the boundaries of their own expertise. Innovation often occurs at the intersection of disciplines.

When people from different fields collaborate, they bring unique perspectives and methodologies that can lead to ground-breaking discoveries. Just look at the Human Genome Project (HGP), which involved teams of researchers working together to achieve a common goal. The HGP was a voyage of biological discovery led by an international group of researchers looking to comprehensively study all the DNA of a select set of organisms.

Launched in October 1990 and completed in April 2003, the HGP’s major accomplishment – generating the first sequence of the human genome – provided fundamental information about the human blueprint, which has since accelerated the study of human biology and improved the practice of medicine. What we need are more such projects where people work together towards a common goal.

Avoiding siloes

Competition and siloed thinking can, however, hinder progress. Individuals and companies may be reluctant to share knowledge or resources due to concerns about leaking intellectual property, not getting recognition or losing funding opportunities. But knowledge needs to be spread, not least because vesting know-how in a single individual is risky if that person leaves an organization. When you share knowledge, you never know what it can lead to.

Collaborative teams with people from different disciplines are better equipped to handle setbacks and challenges as, when faced with obstacles, team members can rely on each other for support and help seeking alternative solutions. Collective resilience is important in STEMM fields, where failure is often a stepping stone to success. Ultimately the progress and success of humanity depends on our ability to work together.

In practical terms, I am pleased to say that the Institute of Physics (IOP) Business Innovation Awards, which have been running for almost 15 years, embrace much of what I have been talking about. They recognize and celebrate small, medium and large companies that have excelled in innovation, delivering significant economic and/or societal impact through the application of physics.

Whilst the award-winning product innovations recognized by the IOP need to have some link to physics, they almost always involve some other fundamental science. What’s more, the innovations invariably need input from engineering design and manufacture, from software development, and from expertise in, say, medicine, aerospace, nuclear power or food science. Successful winners demonstrate strong multidisciplinary collaboration within their teams.

The bottom line is that’s vital for STEMM professionals to stick together and not try to trump each other with statements like Rutherford’s. For collaboration to work effectively, it requires mutual respect across all contributors. And by working well together, we will drive innovation, help solve complex problems, and shape a better future for the world. As a physicist by training, I naturally have a certain loyalty to the subject. But I’m hugely grateful for what I’ve learnt and achieved by working with people from other disciplines.

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A new microscope inspired by the design of Keplerian telescopes produces much sharper images from luminescence from biological cells than was possible with previous devices. Dubbed the “QIScope” by its creators, the device’s highly sensitive camera can detect extremely low levels of light and could be used to observe delicate biostructures in greater detail and over longer periods of time without damaging them.

Many organisms naturally produce light via special enzymes in their cells. Although most such bioluminescent creatures are found in the ocean – think of anglerfish and firefly squid – there are also examples of terrestrial bioluminescent organisms, including bacteria and molluscs.

For researchers in life sciences, harnessing this light is an attractive alternative to imaging organisms using fluorescence. This is because it does not rely on strong external illumination, which can damage cells or interfere with the subtle signals they produce. The downside is that bioluminescence is feeble by comparison, so using it produces relatively low-resolution images.

Researchers led by Jian Cui of Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, have now used a new detector technology called a quantum image sensor (QIS) to improve the resolution of bioluminescence imaging. By integrating this sensor into an unconventional optical microscope design, they increased the number of photons per pixel without sacrificing spatial resolution or field-of-view (FOV), as previous bioluminescence microscopes did.

“Telescope-within-a-microscope”

To avoid this restriction, which is known as vignetting, Cui explains that the team separated the two lenses and inserted a Keplerian telescope between them. “This ‘telescope-within-a-microscope’ reshapes the output of the objective lens to match the width of the tube lens’ back aperture,” he says.

The resulting “QIScope”, as the researchers call it, substantially reduces the size of the image while still capturing the full FOV. The result: an instrument with a higher signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution, leading to crisper images than was possible before.

“New detector technologies are being developed all the time and some of them are very impressive,” Cui says. “However, we shouldn’t think about simply putting cameras on microscopes – sometimes you need to design the microscope around the properties of the camera. And this is what we have done.”

The researchers, who detail their work in Nature Methods, hope it will spur more interest in bioluminescence as an imaging tool. “There is a lot of untapped potential here and it could have advantages for certain applications such as studying photosensitive samples or low-abundance proteins,” Cui tells Physics World. “It could be used to study a range of biological systems – from single cells to organoids and tissue models. And since it can be used for long periods, it could reveal subtle and long-term changes in cell behaviour, so supporting progress in diverse research areas, including cell biology, disease modelling and drug discovery.”

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A physicist from Vilnius University in Lithuania has created a 3D-printed replica of the Sorbonne Chapel so small it fits on a human hair.

Located in Paris’s Latin Quarter, the Chapel of Sainte-Ursule de la Sorbonne is a Roman Catholic chapel and was constructed in the 17th century.

To create the structure, Gordon Zyla, who carries out research in light technologies at Vilnius’s Laser Research Centre, used a laser nanofabrication technique known as multiphoton 3D lithography.

“Unlike conventional 3D printing, this approach can solidify a light-sensitive material at virtually any point in space, enabling the fabrication of truly 3D structures,” notes Zyla.

The length of the finished product is approximately 120 micrometres long, being 275,000 times smaller than the original yet still preserving its architectural details.

Late last week, the model was presented as a symbolic gift to Sorbonne University president Nathalie Drach-Temam during a visit to Vilnius.

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Damage to the spinal cord can disrupt communication between the brain and body, with potentially devastating effects. Spinal cord injuries can cause permanent loss of sensory, motor and autonomic functions, or even paralysis, and there’s currently no cure. To address this inadequacy, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the University of Auckland in New Zealand have developed an ultrathin bioelectric implant that improved movement in rats with spinal cord injuries.

The implant works by delivering a low-frequency pulsed electric field (EF) across the injury site – an approach that shows promise in promoting regeneration of axons (nerve fibres) and improving outcomes. Traditional EF treatments, however, rely on metal electrodes that are prone to corrosion. In this latest study, described in Nature Communications, the researchers fabricated stimulation electrodes from sputtered iridium oxide films (SIROF), which exhibit superior durability and stability to their metal counterparts.

The team further enhanced the EF treatment by placing the electrodes directly on the spinal cord to deliver stimulation directly to the injury site. Although this subdural positioning requires more invasive surgery than the epidural placement used previously, it should deliver stronger stimulation while using an order of magnitude less power than epidural electrodes.

“We chose subdural stimulation because it avoids the shunting effect of cerebrospinal fluid, which is highly conductive and can weaken the electric field when electrodes are placed epidurally,” explains co-lead researcher Lukas Matter from Chalmers University of Technology. “Subdural placement puts the electrodes directly on the spinal cord, allowing for stronger and more precise stimulation with lower current.”

Restoring motion and sensation

Matter and collaborators tested the implants in rats with spinal cord injuries, using 200 μm diameter SIROF electrodes placed on either side of the injury site. The animals received 1 h of EF treatment daily for the first 7–11 days, and then on weekdays only for up to 12 weeks.

To compare EF treatment with natural healing (unlike humans, rats can recover after spinal cord injury), the researchers assessed the hind-limb function of both treated and non-treated rats. They found that during the first week, the non-treated group recovered faster than the treated group. From week 4 onwards, however, treated rats showed significantly improved locomotion and coordination compared with non-treated rats, indicating greater recovery of hind-limb function.

The treated rats continued to improve until the end of the study (week 12), while non-treated rats showed no further improvement after week 5. At week 12, all of the treated animals exhibited consistent coordination between front and hind limbs, compared with only 20% of non-treated rats, which struggled to move smoothly.

The team also assessed the recovery of mechanical sensation by touching the animals’ paws with a metal filament. Treated rats withdrew their paws faster than non-treated rats, suggesting a recovery of touch sensitivity – though the researchers note that this may reflect hypersensitivity.

“This indicates that the treatment supported recovery of both movement and sensation,” says co-lead researcher Bruce Harland from the University of Auckland in a press statement. “Just as importantly, our analysis confirmed that the treatment did not cause inflammation or other damage to the spinal cord, demonstrating that it was not only effective but also safe.”

Durable design

To confirm the superior stability of SIROF electrodes, the researchers performed benchtop tests mimicking the in vivo treatment. The SIROF electrodes showed no signs of dysfunction or delamination, while platinum electrodes corroded and failed.

“Platinum electrodes are prone to degradation over time, especially at high charge densities, due to irreversible electrochemical reactions that cause corrosion and delamination, ultimately compromising their long-term stability,” says Matter. “SIROF enables reversible charge injection through surface-bound oxidation states, minimizing the generation of potentially toxic stimulation byproducts and enhancing their stimulation capabilities.”

In contrast with previous studies, the researchers did not see any change in axon density around the lesion site. Matter suggests some possible reasons for this finding: “The 12-week time point may have been too late to capture early signs of regeneration. The injury itself created a large cystic cavity, which may have blocked axon growth. Also, electric field treatment might improve recovery through protective or alternative mechanisms, not necessarily by promoting new axon growth”.

The researchers are now developing an enhanced version of the implant with larger electrodes based on the conductive polymer PEDOT, which enables higher charge densities without compromising biocompatibility. This will allow them to assess a broader range of field strengths and pulse durations in order to determine the optimal treatment conditions. They also plan to test the implant in larger animal models, and hope to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the locomotion improvement using ex vivo models.

As for the possibility of future clinical implementation, senior author Maria Asplund of Chalmers University envisions a temporary, possibly biodegradable, subdural implant that safely delivers low-frequency EF therapy. “This could be implanted early after spinal cord injury to support axon regrowth and reduce the follow-up damage that occurs after the injury itself,” she tells Physics World.

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Scientists in Switzerland and Japan have uncovered what they say is the first direct evidence that materials at the bottom of the Earth’s mantle flow like a massive river. This literally “ground-breaking” finding, made by comparing seismic data with laboratory studies of materials at high pressures and temperatures, could reshape our understanding of the dynamics at play deep within our planet’s interior.

For over half a century, one of the greatest unresolved mysteries in geosciences has been a phenomenon that occurs just above the boundary where the Earth’s solid mantle meets its liquid core, says Motohiko Murakami, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich who led the new research effort. Within this so-called D” layer, the velocity of seismic waves passing through the mantle abruptly increases, and no-one is entirely sure why.

This increase is known as the D” discontinuity, and one possible explanation for it is a change in the material the waves are travelling through. Indeed, in 2004, Murakami and colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s department of earth and planetary sciences suspected they’d uncovered an explanation along just these lines.

In this earlier study, the researchers showed that perovskite – the main mineral present in the Earth’s lower mantle – transforms into a different substance known as post-perovskite under the extreme pressures and temperatures characteristic of the D” layer. Accordingly, they hypothesized that this phase change could explain the jump in the speed of seismic waves.

Nature, however, had other ideas. “In an experimental study on seismic wave speeds across the post-perovskite phase transition we conducted three years later, such a sharp increase in velocity was not observed, bringing the problem back to square one,” Murakami says.

Post-perovskite crystals line up

Subsequent computer modelling revealed a subtler effect at play. According to these models, the hardness of post-perovskite materials is not fixed. Instead, it depends on the direction of the material’s crystals – and seismic waves through the material will only speed up when all the crystals point in the same direction.

In the new work, which they detail in Communications Earth & Environment, Murakami and colleagues at Tohoku University and the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute confirmed this in a laboratory experiment for the first time. They obtained their results by placing crystals of a post-perovskite with the chemical formula MgGeO₃ in a special apparatus designed to replicate the extreme pressures (around 1 million atmospheres) and temperatures (around 2500 K) found at the D” depth nearly 3000 km below the Earth’s surface. They then measured the velocity of lab-produced seismic waves sent through this material.

These measurements show that while randomly-oriented crystal samples do not reproduce the shear wave velocity jump at the D” discontinuity, crystals oriented along the (001) slip plane of the material’s lattice do. But what could make these crystals line up?

Evidence of a moving mantle

The answer, Murakami says, lies in slow, convective motions that cause the lower mantle to move at a rate of several centimetres per year. “This convection drives plate tectonics, volcanic activity and earthquakes but its effects have primarily been studied in the shallower region of the mantle,” he explains. “And until now, direct evidence of material movement in the deep mantle, nearly 3000 km beneath the surface, has remained elusive.”

Murakami explains that the post-perovskite mineral is rigid in one direction while being softer in others. “Since it naturally aligns its harder axis with the mantle flow, it effectively creates a structured arrangement at the base of the mantle,” he says.

According to Murakami, the discovery that solid (and not liquid) rock flows at this depth does more than just solve the D” layer mystery. It could also become a critical tool for identifying the locations at which large-scale mantle upwellings, or superplumes, originate. This, in turn, could provide new insights into Earth’s internal dynamics.

Building on these findings, the researchers say they now plan to further investigate the causes of superplume formation. “Superplumes are believed to trigger massive volcanic eruptions at the Earth’s surface, and their activity has shown a striking correlation — occurring just before two major mass extinction events in Earth’s history,” Murakami says.

Being able to understand – and perhaps even predict – future superplume activity could therefore “provide critical insights into the long-term survival of humanity”, he tells Physics World. “Such deep mantle processes may have profound implications for global environmental stability,” he says. “By advancing this research, we aim to uncover the mechanisms driving these extraordinary mantle events and assess their potential impact on Earth’s future.”

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According to a recent white paper from the UK’s National Association of Disabled Staff Networks, 22% of working-age people in the UK have a disability compared to less than 7% of people working in science. At the upper echelons of science, only 4% of senior academic positions are filled with people with disabilities and just 1% of research grant applications to UK Research and Innovation are from researchers who disclose being disabled.

These disappointing statistics are reported in “Towards a fully inclusive environment for disabled people in STEMM” and this podcast features an interview with one of its authors – the physicist Francesca Doddato.

Based at Lancaster University, Doddato tells Physics World’s Michael Banks about the challenges facing scientists with disabilities – and calls for decision makers to engage with the issues and to remove barriers.

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Quantum computers promise to revolutionize technology, but first they must overcome decoherence: the loss of quantum information caused by environmental noise. Topological quantum computers aim to do this by storing information in protected states called Majorana modes, but identifying materials that can support these modes has proved tricky and sometimes controversial.

Researchers in the US and Ireland have now developed a method that could make it easier. Using a modified form of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) with a superconducting tip, they built a tool that maps subtle features of a material’s internal quantum state – an achievement that could reveal which materials contain the elusive Majorana modes.

Going on a Majorana hunt

Unlike regular particles, a Majorana particle is its own antiparticle. It is also, strictly speaking, hypothetical – at least in its fundamental form. “So far, no one has definitively found this particle,” says Séamus Davis of University College Cork, who co-led the research with Dung-Hai Lee of the University of California, Berkeley. However, Davis adds, “all serious theorists believe that it should exist in our universe”.

Majorana modes are a slightly different beast. Rather than being fundamental particles, they are quasiparticle excitations that exhibit Majorana-like properties, and theory predicts that they should exist on the edges or surfaces of certain superconducting materials. But not every superconductor can host these states. The material must be topological, meaning its electrons are arranged in a special, symmetry-protected way. And unlike in most conventional superconductors, where electrons pair up with their spins pointing in opposite directions, the paired electrons in these materials have their spins aligned.

To distinguish these characteristics experimentally, Davis, Lee and colleagues invented what Davis calls “a new type of quantum microscope”. This special version of STM uses a superconducting tip to probe the surface of another superconductor. When the tip and sample interact, they produce telltale signals of so-called Andreev bound states (ABSs), which are localized quantum states that arise at boundaries, impurities or interfaces within a material.

The new microscope does more than just detect these states, however. It also lets users tweak the coupling strength between tip and sample to see how the energy of the ABS changes. This is critical, as it helps researchers determine whether the superconductor is chiral, meaning that the movement of its electron pairs has a preferred direction that doesn’t change when time runs backward. This breaking of time-reversal symmetry is characteristic of Majorana surface states. Hence, if a certain material shows both ABSs and chirality, scientists know it’s the material they’re looking for: a so-called topological superconductor.

Gonna catch a big one?

To demonstrate the method, the team applied it to uranium ditelluride (UTe₂), a superconductor with the desired electron pairing that was previously considered a strong candidate for topological superconductivity. Alas, measurements with the new microscope showed that UTe₂ doesn’t fit the bill.

“If UTe₂ superconductivity did break time reversal and sustain a chiral state, then we would have imaged Majoranas and proven it is a topological superconductor,” says Davis. “But UTe₂ does not break that symmetry.”

Despite this disappointment, Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in the US who was not involved in the research, says that studying UTe₂’s superconducting state could still be useful. “Searching for topological superconductors is interesting in its own right,” he says.

While some physicists are sceptical that topological superconductors will deliver on their quantum computing potential, citing years of ambiguous data and unfulfilled claims, that scepticism doesn’t necessarily translate to disinterest. Even if such materials never lead to a working quantum computer, Kivelson believes understanding them is still essential. “One doesn’t need these sexy buzzwords to justify the importance of this work,” he says.

According to Davis, the value of the team’s work lies in the tool it introduces. The Andreev STM method, especially when combined with tip tuning and quasiparticle interference imaging, allows researchers to identify topological superconductors definitively. The technique also offers something more commonly-used bulk techniques cannot achieve: a real-space, high-resolution view of the superconductor’s pairing symmetry, including node imaging and phase variation across the material’s surface.

The team is now using its method to survey other candidate materials, including UPt₃, which Davis describes as “the most likely one” to show the right properties. “If we find one which has Majoranas on the surface, that will open the door to applications,” he says.

The “strategic objective”, Davis adds, would be to get away from trying to create Majorana modes in engineered systems such as nanowires layered with superconductors, as companies such as Microsoft and Nokia are doing. Finding an intrinsic topological superconductor would, he suggests, be simpler.

The research is published in Science.

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When Werner Heisenberg travelled to Helgoland in June 1925, he surely couldn’t have imagined that more than 300 researchers would make the same journey exactly a century later. But his development of the principles of quantum mechanics on the tiny North Sea island proved so significant that the crème de la crème of quantum physics, including four Nobel laureates, attended a five-day conference on Helgoland in June to mark the centenary of his breakthrough.

Just as Heisenberg had done, delegates travelled to the German archipelago by boat, leading one person to joke that if the ferry from Hamburg were to sink, “that’s basically quantum theory scuppered for a generation”. Fortunately, the vessel survived the four-hour trip up the river Elbe and 50 km out to sea – despite strong winds almost leading to a last-minute cancellation. The physicists returned in one piece too, meaning the future of quantum physics is safe.

These days Helgoland is a thriving tourist destination, offering beaches, bird-watching and boating, along with cafes, restaurants and shops selling luxury goods (the island benefits from being duty-free). But even 100 years ago it was a popular resort, especially for hay-fever sufferers like Heisenberg, who took a leave of absence from his post-doc under Max Born in Göttingen to seek refuge from a particularly bad bout of the illness on the windy and largely pollen-free island.

More than five years in the making, Helgoland 2025 was organized by Florian Marquardt and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Yale University quantum physicist Jack Harris, who said he was “very happy” with how the meeting turned out. As well as the quartet of Nobel laureates – Alain Aspect, Serge Haroche, David Wineland and Anton Zeilinger – there were many eager and enthusiastic early-career physicists who will be the future stars of quantum physics.

Questioning the foundations

When quantum physics began 100 years ago, only a handful of people were involved in the field. As well as Heisenberg and Born, there were the likes of Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and Pascual Jordan. If WhatsApp had existed back then, the protagonists would have fitted into their own small group chat (perhaps called “The Quantum Apprentices”). But these days quantum physics is a far bigger endeavour.

Helgoland 2025 covered everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing.

With 31 lectures, five panel debates and more than 100 posters, Helgoland 2025 had sessions covering everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and quantum information to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing. In fact, Harris said in an after-dinner speech on the conference’s opening night in Hamburg that he and the organizing team could easily have “filled two or three solid programmes with people from whom we would have loved to hear”.

Harris’s big idea was to bring together theorists working on the foundational aspects of quantum mechanics with researchers applying those principles to quantum computing, sensing and communications. “[I hoped they] would enjoy talking to each other on an equal footing,” he told me after the meeting. “These topics have a lot of overlap, but that overlap isn’t always well-represented at conferences devoted to one or the other.”

In terms of foundational questions, speakers covered issues such as entanglement, superposition, non-locality, the meaning of measurement and the nature of information, particles, quantum states and randomness. Nicholas Gisin from the University of Geneva said physics is, at heart, all about extracting information from nature. Renato Renner from ETH Zurich discussed how to treat observers in quantum physics. Zeilinger argued that quantum states are states of knowledge – but, if so, do they exist only when measured?

Italian theorist and author Carlo Rovelli, who was constantly surrounded in the coffee breaks, gave a lecture on loop quantum gravity as a solution to marrying quantum physics with general relativity. In a talk on quantizing space–time, Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton discussed information loss and black holes, saying that a “white” black hole the size of a bacterium would be as hot as the Sun and emit so much light we could see it with the naked eye.

Markus Aspelmeyer from the University of Vienna spoke about creating non-classical (i.e. quantum) sources of gravity in table-top experiments and tackled the prospect of gravitationally induced entanglement. Jun Ye from the University of Colorado, Boulder, talked about improving atomic clocks for fundamental physics. Bill Unruh from the University of British Columbia discussed the nature of particles, concluding that: “A particle is what a particle detector detects”.

It almost came as a relief when Gemma de les Coves from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona flashed up a slide joking : “I do not understand quantum mechanics.”

Applying quantum ideas

Discussing foundational topics might seem self-indulgent given the burgeoning (and financially lucrative) applications of quantum physics. But those basic questions are not only intriguing in their own right – they also help to attract newcomers into quantum physics. What’s more, practical matters like quantum computing, code breaking and signal detection are not just technical and engineering endeavours. “They hinge on our ability to understand those foundational questions,” says Harris.

In fact, plenty of practical applications were discussed at Helgoland. As Michelle Simmons from the University of New South Wales pointed out, the last 25 years have been a “golden age” for experimental quantum physics. “We now have the tools that allow us to manipulate the world at the very smallest length scales,” she said on the Physics World Weekly podcast. “We’re able for the first time to try and control quantum states and see if we can use them for different types of information encoding or for sensing.”

One presenter discussing applications was Jian-Wei Pan from the University of Science and Technology of China, who spoke about quantum computing and quantum communication across space, which relies on sustaining quantum entanglement over long distances and times. David Moore from Yale discussed some amazing practical experiments his group is doing using levitated, trapped silica microspheres as quantum sensors to detect what he called the “invisible” universe – neutrinos and perhaps even dark matter.

Nergis Mavalvala from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, reminded us that gravitational-wave detectors, such as LIGO, rely on quantum physics to tackle the problem of “shot noise”, which otherwise limits their performance. Nathalie de Leon from Princeton University, who admitted on the final day she was going a bit “stir crazy” on the island, discussed quantum sensing with diamond.

Outside influences

Helgoland 2025 proved that quantum physicists have much to shout about, but also highlighted the many challenges still lying in store. How can we move from systems with just a few quantum bits to hundreds or thousands? How can quantum error correction help make noisy quantum systems reliable? What will we do with an exponential speed-up in computing? Is there a clear border between quantum and classical physics – and, if so, where is it?

By cooping participants together on an island with such strong historical associations, Harris hopes that Helgoland 2025 will have catalyzed new thinking. “I got to meet a lot of people I had always wanted to meet and re-connect with folks I’d been out of touch with for a long time,” he said. “I had wonderful conversations that I don’t think would have happened anywhere else. It is these kinds of person-to-person connections that often make the biggest impact.”

Occasionally, though, the outside world did encroach on the meeting. To a round of applause, Rovelli said that physicists must keep working with Russian scientists, and warned of the dangers of demonizing others. Pan, who had to give his talk on a pre-recorded video, said it was “with much regret” that he was prevented from travelling to Helgoland from China. There were a few rumbles about the conference being sponsored in part by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office.

Quantum physicists would also do well to find out more about the philosophy of science. Questions like the role of the observer, the nature of measurement, and the meaning of non-locality are central to quantum physics but are philosophical as much as scientific. Even knowing the philosophy relevant to the early years of quantum physics is important. As Elise Crull from the City University of New York said: “Physicists ignore this early philosophy at their peril”.

Towards the next century

The conference ended with a debate, chaired by Tracy Northup from the University of Innsbruck, on the next 100 years of quantum physics, where panellists agreed that the field’s ongoing mysteries are what will sustain it. “When we teach quantum mechanics, we should not be hiding the open problems, which are what interest students,” said Lorenzo Maccone from the University of Pavia in Italy. “They enjoy hearing there’s no consensus on, say the Wigner’s friend paradox. They seem engaged [and it shows] physics is not something dead.”

The importance of global links in science was underlined too. “Big advances usually come from international collaboration or friendly competition,” said panellist Gerd Leuchs from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. “We should do everything we can to keep up collaboration. Scientists aren’t better people but they share a common language. Maintaining links across borders dampens violence.”

Leuchs also reminded the audience of the importance of scientists admitting they aren’t always right. “Scientists are often viewed as being arrogant, but we love to be proved wrong and we should teach people to enjoy being wrong,” he said. “If you want to be successful as a scientist, you have to be willing to change your mind. This is something that can be useful in the rest of society.”

I’ll leave the final word to Max Lock – a postdoc from the Technical University of Vienna – who is part of a new generation of quantum physicists who have grown up with the weird but entirely self-consistent world of quantum physics. Reflecting on what happened at Helgoland, Lock said he was struck most by the contrast between what was being celebrated and the celebration itself.

“Heisenberg was an audacious 23-year-old whose insight spurred on a community of young and revolutionary thinkers,” he remarked. “With the utmost respect for the many years of experience and achievements that we saw on the stage, I’m quite sure that if there’s another revolution around the corner, it’ll come from the young members of the audience who are ready to turn the world upside down again.”

• Tracy Northup and Michelle Simmons appear alongside fellow quantum physicist Peter Zoller on the 19 June 2025 edition of the Physics World Weekly podcast

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As the number of cancer cases continues to grow, radiation oncology departments are under increasing pressure to treat more and more patients. And as clinical facilities expand to manage this ongoing growth, and technology developments increase the complexity of radiotherapy delivery, there’s an urgent need to optimize the treatment workflow without ramping up time or staffing requirements.

To enable this level of optimization, radiation therapy departments will require an efficient quality management system that can handle both machine and patient quality assurance (QA), works seamlessly with treatment devices from multiple vendors, and provides the time savings required to ease staff workload.

Driven by growth

A case in point is the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, which in 2018 shifted all of its QA to SunCHECK, a quality management platform from Sun Nuclear that combines hardware and software to streamline treatment and delivery system QA into one centralized platform. Speaking at a recent Sun Nuclear webinar, clinical physicist Daniel Opp explained that the primary driver for this switch was growth.

“In 2018, our physicians were shifting to perform a lot more SBRT [stereotactic body radiation therapy]. Our leadership had plans in motion to add online adaptive planning as well as expand with opening more radiation oncology centres,” he explained.

At that time, the centre was using multiple software platforms and many different imaging phantoms to run its QA, with physicists still relying on manual measurements and qualitative visual assessments. Now, the team performs all machine QA using SunCHECK Machine and almost all patient-specific QA [PSQA] using SunCHECK Patient.

“Our QA software and data were fractured and all over the place,” said Opp. “The move to SunCHECK made sense as it gave us the ability to integrate all measurements, software and databases into a one-stop shop, providing significant time savings and far cleaner record keeping.”

SunCHECK also simplifies QA procedures by consolidating tests. Opp explained that back in 2018, photon tests on the centre’s linacs required five setups, 12 measurements and manually entering values 22 times; SunCHECK reduced this to one setup, four measurements and no manual entries. “This alone gives you an overview of the significant time savings,” he said.

Another benefit is the ability to automate tests and ensure standardization. “If you tell our large group of physicists to do a picket fence test, we’ll all do it a little differently,” Opp explained. “Having one system on which we’re all running the same tests means that we’re able to do the test in the same way across all our linacs.”

Opp noted that SunCHECK displays all required information on an easy-to-read screen, with the patient QA worklist on one side and the machine QA worklist on the other. “You see a snapshot of the clinic and can figure out if there’s anything you need to take care of. It’s very efficient in letting you know when something needs your attention,” he said.

A unified platform

Medical physicist Patricia Sansourekidou of the University of New Mexico (UNM) Comprehensive Cancer Center in Albuquerque, also implemented SunCHECK to improve the efficiency of the site’s quality management programmes.

Sansourekidou initiated the switch to SunCHECK after joining UNM in 2020 as its new director of medical physics. At that time the cancer centre was treating about 1000 patients per year. But high patient numbers led to a long waiting list – with roughly three months between referral and the start of treatment – and clear need for the facility to expand.

Assessing the centre’s QA procedures in 2020 revealed that the team was using a wide variety of QA software, making routine checks time consuming. Monthly linac QA, for example, required roughly 32 files and took about 14 hours to perform. In addition, Sansourekidou noted, physicists were spending hours every month adjusting the machines. “One day it was the energy that was off and then the output was off; I soon realised that, in the absence of appropriate software, we were making adjustments back and forth,” she said. “More importantly, we had no way to track these trends.”

Sansourekidou concluded that the centre needed an improved QA solution based on one unified platform. “So we went on a physics hunt,” she said. “We met with every vendor out there and Sun Nuclear won the request for proposal. So we implemented SunCHECK Machine and SunCHECK Patient.”

Switching to SunCHECK reduced monthly QA to just 4–5 hours per linac. “We’re saving about nine hours per linac per month; that’s 324 hours per year when we could be doing something else for our patients,” said Sansourekidou. Importantly, the new software enables the team to visualize trends and assess whether a genuine problem is present.

For daily QA, which previously required numerous spreadsheets and systems, SunCHECK’s daily QA template provides time savings of about 60%. “At six in the morning, that’s important,” Sansourekidou pointed out. Annual QA saw roughly 33% time savings, while for the 70% of patients requiring PSQA, time savings were about 25%.

Another “unexpected side effect” of deploying SunCHECK, said Sansourekidou, is that the IT department was happy to maintain one platform. “Every time we have a new physicist, it’s much easier for our IT department to set them up. That has been a huge benefit for us,” she said. “Additionally, our service engineers are happy because we are not spending hours of their time adjusting the machine back and forth.”

“Overall, I thought there were great improvements that really helped us justify the initial investment – not just monetary, but also time investment from our physics team,” she said.

Phantom-free QA

For Opp, one of the biggest features enabled by SunCHECK was the move to phantom-free PSQA, which saves a lot of time and eliminates errors that can be inherent to phantom-based QA. In the last year, the Moffitt team also switched to using DoseCHECK – SunCHECK’s secondary 3D dose calculation algorithm – as the foundation of its quality checks. Alongside, a RayStation script checks plan deliverability to ensure that no problems arise once the patient is on the table.

“We don’t do our pre-treatment QA anymore. We rely on those two to get confidence into the final work and then we run our logs off the first patient fraction,” Opp explained. “We have a large physics group and there was natural apprehension, but everybody got on board and agreed that this was a shift we needed to make. We leveraged DoseCHECK to create a better QA system for ourselves.”

Since 2018, both patient workload and staff numbers at the Moffitt Cancer Center have doubled. By the end of 2025, it will also have almost doubled its number of treatment units. The centre has over 100 SunCHECK users – including therapists, dosimetrists and physicists – and Opp emphasized that the system is robust enough to handle all these users doing different tasks at different times without any issues.

As patient numbers increase, the time savings conferred by SunCHECK help reduce staff workload and improve quality-of-life for users. The centre currently performs about 100 PSQA procedures per week, which would have taken about 37 hours using previous QA processes – a workload that Opp notes would not be managed well. SunCHECK reduced the weekly average to around seven hours.

Similarly, linac QA previously required two or three late nights per month (or one full day on the weekend). “After the switch to SunCHECK, everybody’s pretty much able to get it done in one late night per month,” said Opp. He added that the Moffitt Cancer Center’s continuing growth has required the onboarding of many new physicists – and that it’s significantly easier to train these new staff with all of the QA software in one centralized platform.

Enabling accreditation

Finally, accreditation is essential for radiation oncology departments to demonstrate the ability to deliver safe, high-quality care. The UNM Comprehensive Cancer Centre’s previous American College of Radiology (ACR) accreditation had expired before Sansourekidou’s arrival, and she was keen to rectify this situation. And in March 2024 the centre achieved ASTRO’s APEx accreditation.

“SunCHECK helped with that,” she said. “It wasn’t the only reason, there were other things that we had to improve, but we did come across as having a strong physics programme.”

Achieving accreditation also helps justify the purchase of a totally new QA platform, Sansourekidou explained. “The most important thing to explain to your administration is that if we don’t do things the way that our regulatory bodies advise, then not only will we lose our accreditation, but we will fall behind,” she said.

Sansourekidou emphasized that the efficiency gains conferred by SunCHECK were invaluable for the physics team, particularly for out-of-hours working. “We saw huge time savings for both monthly and daily QA,” she said. “It is a large investment, but improving efficiency through investment in software will really help the department in the long term.”

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Hundreds of physicists gathered on the island of Helgoland in June to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the invention of quantum mechanics by the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The event – Helgoland 2025 – is a centrepiece of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology and it drew 300 quantum physicists with plenary talks and panel discussions ranging from philosophical puzzles like Wigner’s friend to state-of-the-art experiments in quantum computing.

In 1925 Heisenberg travelled to the island, off the coast of Germany, to recover from hay fever. While there he put together a mathematical framework for quantum mechanics that gave up the “visualizability” of quantum phenomena and strictly focused on “observables”. Heisenberg’s mythical stay on Helgoland is traditionally celebrated as the birth of quantum mechanics.

I attended the event as a philosopher of science with a background in quantum mechanics, and I was keen to learn more about participants’ views about the relationship between philosophy and physics. Quantum information theory lives at the intersection of philosophy and physics, as the field has been one of the primary drivers of renewed progress in the philosophy of quantum mechanics and its interpretations.

Renowned for being the financial powerhouse of quantum computing, quantum-information theory is flush with funding for building computers promising “quantum advantage”. Isaac Chuang from Massachusetts Institute of Technology bluntly told the audience that these computers currently do not serve any important economic function. The theory behind the boom in quantum computing has been equally important for philosophers and physicists looking for a compelling list of axioms from quantum mechanics, akin to Einstein’s postulates for relativity.

Like most scientific pursuits, quantum information did not begin with practical ends in mind, but with honest questions about nature. In the 1990s it was closer to foundational issues about the meaning of quantum mechanics. The growth of this philosophical-physical discipline called “quantum foundations”, while not a moneymaker, has made the field more introspective about concepts in desperate need of elucidation. Terms such as measurement, superposition, nonlocality and the metaphysics of quantum states are hotly debated in the community.

As has happened multiple times, Nobel laureates Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger sparred at Helgoland over the ontology of quantum states. Zeilinger defended the viewpoint that quantum states are states of knowledge, while Aspect defended nonlocality on pragmatic grounds. When Markus Aspelmeyer from the University of Vienna finished his talk on looking for gravitationally induced entanglement, he was asked what this phenomenon could mean if quantum states are only knowledge.

None of the talks attempted to fix a consensus about foundational questions. As the British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his 1969 book On Certainty, “At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.” Talks by Christopher Fuchs from the University of Massachusetts Boston and Robert Spekkens from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada underscored that we must be willing to dissect the theory to find what makes quantum mechanics truly quantum, and this will reveal what is special about nature. This patience for not jumping the gun on quantum ontology has paid off.

Spekkens showed that many phenomena taken to be uniquely quantum – the uncertainty relations, interference and wave–particle duality – are not the root of the mystery and can be accounted for classically. He referred to remaining phenomena as the “thin film” of quantum mechanics, such as Bell inequality violations, that cannot be accounted for in any classical theory. The pedagogical strategy of making quantum theory look as classical as possible was picked up in a panel discussion on the last day. The panellists suggested that physics educators not sensationalize the theory and use the most intuitive, “classical” reasoning available.

While at Helgoland, I had a discussion with philosopher Elise Crull from City College of New York and IBM quantum physicist Charles Bennett about the philosophy of science. Crull said how physics and philosophy can support each other, as physics was once a branch of natural philosophy. In fact, in her classes, Crull says she shows students how philosophically engaged the pioneers of quantum mechanics were – for example, how Bohr and Einstein were broadly familiar with Kantian philosophy.

Bennett, meanwhile, told the story of how he built up the field of quantum information theory by calculating the amount of energy necessary for computing with a quantum bit. He emphasized that one of a scientist’s great virtues is the joy of being wrong. We do not have to back down from the truth and we can also believe it is important to humanize others. If we can admit that we’re wrong, then non-scientists can too.

Renewed hope

Moral concerns surrounding the culture of science surfaced throughout the conference. It was lost on no-one, for instance, that the vast majority of participants at the conference were men. Crull made this explicit during the opening banquet, when she flashed a slide that slowly populated with the overlooked or outright forgotten voices of women in the invention of quantum mechanics. The slide was completely full by the end. The organization Diversity in Quantum noted that it is examining workplace diversity in quantum sciences and quantum technologies.

Through the celebration, the gravity of our current political environment crept into the otherwise momentous gathering. The invention of quantum mechanics converged with arguably the darkest moment in human history. Among its many moral atrocities, the political ascent of Nazism fractured the intellectual centres of Europe and severely damaged the reputation of German science. The conference saw numerous participants cite the importance of international collaboration and inclusivity in their talks. During the closing remarks of the conference, Časlav Brukner, who is scientific director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, told the crowd, “Love is wise. Hatred is foolish.”

I felt refreshed by the air of solidarity among participants after months of Donald Trump’s cartoonish vitriol towards education and academic freedom. However, I worry that scientists are still too confident that the acceptance of scientific truth is inevitable, as if the status quo will be easily restored in a few years. I have taught physics classes in rural areas where a distrust in scientific institutions resonated with my students, who openly doubted not only the science of evolution and climate change, but also the seemingly exotic features of relativity, or whether human beings landed on the Moon.

I often found that explaining the facts does not change students’ minds because the entire enterprise of science, the meaningfulness of scientific inquiry, often strikes non-scientists as alien and disconnected from the context in which they live. As suggested by Wittgenstein, many of our core beliefs go unexamined and end up in a blind spot. It is difficult to know what our common ground really is, but without it, facts are not salient to us.

They do not look like “facts” at all without a significant amount of education and preparation, not just in terms of technical background but also the culture of scientific inquiry. We require training and acculturation to know how a piece of information is supposed to count as “evidence” for a conclusion. Nothing inevitable follows from the possession or dissemination of facts. It takes a community of peers, not just experts, to recontextualize the facts in terms of our common ground.

I left the conference with renewed hope that quantum physics is thriving but also concerned that scientists are in for a long fight to depoliticize factual information. It is essential that this fight humanizes those who disagree with us as much as it draws a line in the sand against the spreading of falsehoods. Science is not really the default setting for how humans think about the world. As many historians of science point out, a belief in the possibility of science at all, over all its competitors in the history of the world, is quite extraordinary.

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Atomic clocks are crucial to many modern technologies including satellite navigation and telecoms networks, and are also used in fundamental research. The most commonly used clock is based on caesium-133. It uses microwave radiation to excite an electron between two specific hyperfine energy levels in the atom’s ground state. This radiation has a very precise frequency, which is currently used to define the second as the SI unit of time.

Atomic clocks are currently being supplanted by the optical clocks, which use light rather than microwaves to excite atoms. Because optical clocks operate at higher frequencies, they are much more accurate than microwave-based timekeepers.

Despite the potential of optical atomic clocks, the international community has yet to use one to define the second. Before this can happen, metrologists must be able to compare the timekeeping of different types of optical clocks across long distances to verify that they are performing as expected. Now, as part of an EU-funded project, researchers have made a highly coordinated comparison of optical clocks across six countries in two continents: the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and Japan.

Time flies

The study consisted of 38 comparisons (frequency ratios) performed simultaneously with ten different optical clocks. These were an indium ion clock at LUH in Germany; ytterbium ion clocks of two different types at PTB in Germany; a ytterbium ion clock at NPL in the UK; ytterbium atom clocks at INRIM in Italy and NMIJ in Japan; a strontium ion clock at VTT in Finland; and strontium atom clocks at LTE in France and at NPL and PTB.

To compare the clocks, the researchers linked the frequency outputs from the different systems using two methods: radio signals from satellites and laser light travelling through optical fibres. The satellite method used GPS satellite navigation signals, which were available to all the clocks in the study. The team also used customized fibre links, which allowed measurements with 100 times greater precision than the satellite technique. However, fibres could only be used for international connections between clocks in France, Germany and Italy. Short fibre links were used to connect clocks within institutes located in the UK and Germany.

A major challenge was to coordinate the simultaneous operation of all the clocks and links. Another challenge arose at the analysis stage because the results did not always confirm the expected values and there were some inconsistencies in the measurements. However, the benefit of comparing so many clocks at once and using more than one link technique is that it was often possible to identify the source of problems.

Wait a second

The measurements provided a significant addition to the body of data for international clock comparisons. The uncertainties and consistency of such data will influence the choice of which optical transition(s) to use in the new definition of the second.  However, before the redefinition, even lower uncertainties will be required in the comparisons. There are also several other very different criteria that need to be met as well, such as demonstrating that optical clocks can make regular contributions to the international atomic time scale.

Rachel Godun at NPL, who coordinated the clock comparison campaign, says that repeated measurements will be needed to build confidence that the optical clocks and links can be operated reliably and always achieve the expected performance.  She also says that the community must push towards lower measurement uncertainties to reach less than 5 parts in 10¹⁸ – which is the target ahead of the redefinition of the second.  “More comparisons via optical fibre links are therefore needed because these have lower uncertainties than comparisons via satellite techniques”, she tells Physics World.

Pierre Dubé of Canada’s National Research Council says that the unprecedented number of clocks involved in the measurement campaign yielded an extensive data set of frequency ratios that were used to verify the consistency of the results and detect anomalies. Dubé, who was not involved in the study, adds that it significantly improves our knowledge of several optical frequency ratios and our confidence in the measurement methods, which are especially significant for the redefinition of the SI second using optical clocks.

“The optical clock community is strongly motivated to obtain the best possible set of measurements before the SI second is redefined using an optical transition (or a set of optical transitions, depending on the redefinition option chosen)”, Dubé concludes.

The research is described in Optica.

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In materials science, the yield point represents a critical threshold where a material transitions from elastic to plastic deformation. Below this point, materials like glasses can return to their original shape after stress is removed. Beyond it, however, the deformation becomes permanent, reflecting irreversible changes in the material’s internal structure. Understanding this transition is essential for designing materials that can withstand mechanical stress without failure, an important consideration in fields such as civil engineering, aerospace and electronics.

Despite its importance, the yield point in amorphous materials like glasses has remained difficult to study due to the challenges in precisely controlling and measuring the stress and strain required to trigger it. Traditional mechanical testing methods often lack the resolution needed to observe the subtle atomic-scale changes that occur during yielding.

In this study, the authors present a novel approach using X-ray irradiation to induce yielding in germanium-selenium glasses. This method allows for fine-tuned control over the elasto-plastic transition, enabling the researchers to systematically investigate the onset of plastic deformation. By combining experimental techniques with theoretical modelling, they characterize both the thermodynamic behaviour and the atomic-level structural and dynamical responses of the glasses during and after irradiation.

One of the key findings is that glasses processed through this method become stable against further irradiation, an effect that could be highly beneficial in environments with high radiation exposure, such as space missions or nuclear facilities. This work not only provides new insights into the fundamental physics of yielding in disordered materials but also opens up potential pathways for engineering radiation-resistant glassy materials.

Do you want to learn more about this topic?

Theories of glass formation and the glass transition by J S Langer (2014)

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Quantum repeaters are essential components of quantum networks, enabling long-distance entanglement distribution by temporarily storing quantum states. This temporary storage, facilitated by quantum memory, allows synchronization with other network operations and the implementation of error correction protocols, marking a significant advancement over classical repeaters, which merely amplify and retransmit signals. 

Unlike classical systems, quantum repeaters mitigate photon loss, a major source of error in quantum communication. However, widely known quantum repeater designs often suffer from limitations such as the need for high phase stability and an inability to generate strongly entangled states. 

In this work, the authors propose a novel protocol based on post-matching, a technique originally developed in quantum cryptography to verify and secure transmitted information. Their theoretical framework offers new insights into both quantum communication and cryptographic systems, contributing to the advancement of quantum information theory and technology. 

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Explore our Focus on Quantum Entanglement: State of the Art and Open Questions

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Nonlinearity refers to behaviour that deviates from a simple, proportional relationship and cannot be accurately described by linear equations. This concept is fundamental to understanding complex systems across various scientific disciplines, including meteorology, epidemiology, chemistry, and quantum mechanics. 

In the field of quantum optics, achieving nonlinearity at the single-photon level is essential for the development of advanced quantum information protocols. Such nonlinearity enables more precise control over information transmission, facilitates faster and more scalable quantum networks, and enhances the security of quantum communication. 

Rydberg atoms, which are atoms in highly excited states, exhibit strong long-range interactions. These interactions, particularly the Rydberg blockade effect, make them promising candidates for inducing strong nonlinear interactions between photons. However, a key challenge lies in achieving this nonlinearity in a controllable and efficient manner, rather than relying on probabilistic or inefficient methods. 

In this work, the authors introduce a novel approach for precisely engineering Rydberg states to enable continuous tuning of single-photon nonlinearity. This tunability represents a significant advancement, with potential applications spanning fundamental physics and the development of next-generation quantum technologies. 

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Probing quantum correlations in many-body systems: a review of scalable methods by Irénée Frérot, Matteo Fadel and Maciej Lewenstein (2023)

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Supersymmetry is a theoretical framework in which every fermion and boson has a corresponding partner particle, known as a superpartner. These superpartners share the same energy spectrum but differ in their spin properties. The transformations between these particles are governed by mathematical operators called supercharges. Although superpartners have not yet been observed experimentally, their discovery would have significant implications for fundamental physics. 

Twisted bilayer materials, such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides, have attracted attention for their unusual electronic and topological properties. In this study, the authors investigate how supersymmetry manifests in these systems by analysing different energy modes associated with twisted bilayers. 

They find that superpartners can exhibit both trivial and nontrivial topological energy bands. Furthermore, they demonstrate that supersymmetry can spontaneously break due to interactions between charged particles, known as Coulomb interactions. 

This research provides new insights into the interplay between topology, symmetry, and interactions in low-dimensional materials, and opens up new possibilities for exploring supersymmetry in condensed matter systems. 

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Desperately seeking supersymmetry (SUSY) by Stuart Raby (2004)

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The Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model is a theoretical framework used to describe systems of many interacting spins in an external magnetic field. It has been widely applied to study quantum phase transitions, entanglement, and collective spin behaviour. When extended to two modes, the model allows particles to tunnel between two degenerate energy levels, offering insights into quantum systems with multiple states. 

In this study, the authors propose a chiral two mode version of the model using a pair of surface acoustic wave cavities. The chirality in the system preserves the separation between the two modes and prevents them from mixing. By applying specially designed chiral optical drives, the researchers are able to simulate long range asymmetric spin interactions.

This setup enables the simulation of complex quantum phenomena such as time crystal behaviour and ion trap like interactions, without the need for traditional trapping techniques. The work presents a novel approach to engineering and exploring chiral quantum systems using acoustic hybrid platforms.  

Do you want to learn more about this topic?

Time crystals: a review by Krzysztof Sacha and Jakub Zakrzewski (2018)

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Developing a unified theory for liquid behaviour has long been a challenge due to the complex interactions between particles and the constantly changing dynamic disorder within liquids. Current approaches rely on empirical equations of state derived from experiments, which are often specific to individual systems and cannot be easily transferred to others. Compared to the well-established thermodynamic models for solids and gases, our understanding of liquids remains significantly underdeveloped. 

In this study, the authors take a foundational step toward creating a general equation of state for liquids based on phonon theory. If successful, such a model could have wide-ranging applications in planetary science, industrial processes, chemical engineering, and condensed matter physics. 

The authors provide a detailed explanation of how they approached this complex problem and apply their theoretical framework to experimental data for argon and nitrogen. The results show strong agreement, suggesting that the model has the potential for broad applicability. 

This work represents a significant advance in the theoretical understanding of liquids and opens the door to a more unified and transferable approach to liquid thermodynamics. 

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Collective modes and thermodynamics of the liquid state by K Trachenko and V V Brazhkin (2015)

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One of the key challenges in building scalable quantum computers is managing noise during operations in order to improve accuracy. Decoherence, which arises from systematic errors and environmental interactions, disrupts quantum information and limits performance. 

Several strategies exist to reduce decoherence. One approach is dynamical decoupling, which averages out noise through carefully timed control pulses. Another is quantum error correction, which detects and corrects faults in a quantum computation. In this study, the authors explore a third approach by leveraging the symmetry of quantum systems to create decoherence-free subspaces. These subspaces isolate quantum information from environmental noise. 

The authors investigate how these decoherence-free subspaces can be integrated with existing error protection techniques. They construct a logical qubit within a decoherence-free subspace using a specially designed pulse sequence. When combined with dynamical decoupling, this method improves the fidelity of quantum states by up to 23% compared to physical qubits. 

This research presents a practical and effective way to incorporate decoherence-free subspaces into quantum error management, offering a promising path toward more reliable quantum computing. 

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Quantum algorithms for scientific computing by R Au-Yeung, B Camino, O Rathore and V Kendon (2024)

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Time crystals are an intriguing state of matter in which a system exhibits periodic motion even in its lowest energy state. This challenges conventional expectations in physics. These systems arise when time translation symmetry is broken, a principle that normally ensures physical laws remain unchanged over time. 

Unlike ordinary systems, time crystals can exhibit persistent oscillations without absorbing net energy over time. This makes them a subject of great interest in condensed matter physics and a promising candidate for future technologies such as quantum computing, sensing, superconductivity, and energy storage. 

Time crystals can be classified as either discrete or continuous. An external periodic force drives discrete time crystals, while continuous time crystals emerge from the collective and self-sustained oscillations of particles. 

In this study, the authors demonstrate a method for converting a continuous time crystal into a discrete one using a process known as subharmonic injection locking. This technique synchronizes the system’s oscillations with a fraction of the driving frequency. It enables the first observation of a transition between continuous and discrete time crystal states in a system that is not in equilibrium. 

This research provides new insights into the behaviour of time crystals and introduces a powerful approach for controlling and manipulating these unusual phases of matter. 

Do you want to learn more about this topic?

Time crystals: a review by Krzysztof Sacha and Jakub Zakrzewski (2018)

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A strange metal is a type of material that exhibits unusual electrical properties, challenging our conventional understanding of how metals conduct electricity.

In these metals, electrons lose their individual identities, acting collectively in a soup, in which all particles are connected through quantum entanglement. 

Prof. Chung, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Many so-called high temperature superconductors, such as doped cuprates, transition from their superconducting state to a strange metal state as they increase in temperature beyond a critical point. (Note that ‘high’ in this context means above −196.2 °C, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen!)

It has long been thought that revealing the mystery of the strange metal state is the key to understanding the mechanism for high-temperature conductivity. This could lead to understanding what would be required to make a truly room temperature superconductor.

In this new paper, the researchers used a cutting-edge theoretical framework to provide a microscopic description of the strange metal state, focusing on how local charge fluctuations near a critical transition, play a key role.

Their theoretical predictions for quantities such as the specific heat coefficient and the single-particle spectral function in the strange metal state agree well with experimental observations.

This work therefore brings us much closer to understanding how superconductivity emerges from the strange metal state in the cuprates – an open problem in condensed matter physics since the 1990s.

The post How does a strange metal become a room temperature superconductor? appeared first on Physics World.

Most complex carbon molecules – such as those necessary for life – actually exist in two forms. The normal one and its mirror image. The left-handed version and the right-handed version.

Despite containing the same atoms, these two molecules usually have vastly different properties. For example, one might be used as a therapeutic drug, while the other could be inactive or even harmful.

Separating them is therefore very important for several reasons, particularly in the fields of chemistry, biology, and medicine. However, due to the lack of differences in the physical properties of the two molecules, this is usually quite difficult.

When any molecule is exposed to light, its quantum energy levels are split apart because of the interaction.

In this paper, the team found that when this light is circularly polarised, the splitting is different for the two mirrored molecules. They also went on to find that this effect led to different photochemical reactions for each molecule, further providing ways to distinguish them.

These effects could then be used as new methods for separating these mirrored molecules in medicine and beyond.

 

The post What’s the difference between a left-handed molecule and a right-handed one? appeared first on Physics World.

Ever since graphene was first studied in the 2000s, scientists have been interested 2D materials because of their new and interesting electrical and optical properties as well as their potential applications in superconductivity, magnetism and next generation electronics.

In recent years, a new family of these materials has emerged, with a strange new feature: correlated flat bands. Electrons in these bands have the same energy regardless of their movement or position within the material.

In this new work, the researchers used cutting edge theory and computer simulation techniques to understand these types of materials with and predict their properties. In particular, they focused on the interplay between smectic order and topological order.

The term smectic is used when talking about liquid crystals (that’s the same liquid crystal that you find in an LCD TV) . The word just means a state in which the particles are oriented in parallel and arranged in well-defined planes. It’s heavily influenced by the individual particles’ shape structure and charge.

Topological order on other hand is a global type of particle arrangement and is caused by the collective entanglement of all the particles in a system as a whole. It’s very much a quantum phenomenon, and is therefore sometimes unintuitive, strange, and complex.

Usually, these two different types of order are seen to compete with each other, but this study looks at what happens if they exist together.

Based on the results, the team expects several new phase transitions to occur in these systems.

Ultimately, experiments will be required to confirm their predictions. What’s for certain though, is that given how comprehensive this work is, the experimentalists now have a lot of work to do.

The post The different ways of ordering electrons in two dimensional materials. appeared first on Physics World.

Shear-induced structural transitions happen when the structure of a material changes due to the application of force. It’s a phenomenon observed in various systems, including metals like aluminium and iron, molecular crystals such as ice and quartz, and even the Earth’s mantle.

A better understanding of how it works could lead to an improvement in the processing and fabrication of materials with more control on defect formation.

Measuring microscopic processes like this is usually challenging because electron microscopy cannot resolve individual atoms’ motions in bulk solids, and the strong shear force makes things especially difficult.

Here, the researchers used colloidal crystals, allowing them to observe transitions at the single-particle level. As a soft material (one that can easily be deformed), colloid crystals are particularly well-suited for this type of study.

They found that under certain conditions, a liquid layer formed around the growing new crystal structure. This phenomenon is known as “virtual melting” because it occurs well below the effective melting temperature. This liquid layer facilitates the transition by reducing the strain energy at the interface between the old and new crystal structures.

Virtual melting has been proposed in theory and simulation, but had never been directly observed in experiments before. The team’s results not only represent the first experimental observation of this process but also help us to better understand under what circumstances it takes place.

The study has potential applications across various fields, including metallurgy, materials science, and geophysics. The concept of virtual melting could also provide new a new way of thinking about stress relaxation and phase transitions in other systems.

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Protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei are themselves made up of fundamental particles known as quarks. These quarks are held together by the strong interaction via force carriers called gluons.

When heavy atomic nuclei collide at high energies close to the speed of light, these constituent particles can break free from each other. The resulting substance, called a quark–gluon plasma, exhibits collective flowlike behaviour much like an everyday liquid.  Unlike a normal viscous liquid however, these near-perfect fluids lose very little energy as they flow.

Researchers are very interested quark–gluon plasmas because they filled the entire Universe just after the Big Bang before matter as we know it was created.

The CMS Collaboration of scientists at CERN routinely create this state of matter for a very brief moment by colliding large nuclei with each other.  In this paper, the researchers used sound waves as a way of understanding the plasma’s fundamental properties.

Sound is a longitudinal wave that produces compressions and rarefactions of matter in the same direction as its movement. The speed of these waves depends on the medium’s properties, such as its density and viscosity. It can, therefore, be used as a probe of the medium.

The team were able to show that the speed of sound in their quark–gluon plasma was nearly half the speed of light – a measurement they made with record precision compared to previous studies.

The results will help test our theories of the fundamental forces that hold matter together, allowing us to better understand matter in the very early Universe as well as future results at particle colliders.

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Historically, the majority of studies in condensed matter physics have focused on Hermitian systems – closed systems that conserve energy. However, in reality, dissipative processes or non-equilibrium dynamics are commonly present and so real-world systems are anything but Hermitian.

Recently however people have begun to study non-Hermitian systems in detail and have found a range of interesting topological properties. The term topology was originally used to refer to a branch of mathematics describing geometric objects. Here, however, it means the study of the electron band structure in solids, as well as periodic motion more generally.

Topological arguments are often used to determine universal material properties such as conductivity or magnetic susceptibility. For example, topological insulators are insulating in the bulk but have conducting surface or edge states and can be used in a range of applications, such as quantum computing.

Previous work on non-Hermitian band topology has been restricted to one system at a time, or one property at a time. There’s been no way to link between materials or scenarios and no generalisation.

A research team formed of scientists from the Freie Universität Berlin, the Perimeter Institute, and Stockholm University have now brought everything together by using symmetry arguments to build a general, comprehensive theoretical framework for these exciting new systems.

Predictions made by the authors’ analysis will lead to a better understanding of condensed matter physics and hopefully to new developments in a range of fields including optics, acoustics, and electronics.

The post How to make new materials by predicting their universal electronic structure appeared first on Physics World.

A molecular machine is an assembly of molecular components that produces mechanical movements in response to specific stimuli, similar to everyday objects like hinges and switches.

The power of what can be accomplished with these machines in biology is huge. They are responsible for everything from muscle contraction to DNA replication.

Attaining the same precise control over molecular motion with artificial molecular machines is currently an active area of research.

Researchers from the August Chełkowski Institute of Physics have been studying one component of these machines – rotary molecular motors. As the name suggests, these machines convert chemical or electrochemical energy into mechanical work by rotating one part relative to another.

The team built their motors out of phenylene molecules within a solid crystal and studied them with a technique called broadband dielectric spectroscopy.

This measures how a material responds to a varying electrical field.  In addition to imaging rotational motion, it can detect interactions between the molecular machine and its environment.

The team found several key markers within their data that reflected the strength of these interactions and therefore how well the molecular rotors were able to rotate. Using these markers will be important in optimising the design of future molecular rotors and brings us one step closer towards artificial molecular machines.

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New techniques have recently allowed the study of the behaviour of electrons in a similar way to how photons are studied in traditional optics. This emerging area of research – called quantum electron optics – focuses on manipulating and controlling electron waves to create phenomena such as interference and diffraction.

These wavelike electrons are fundamentally quantum in nature. This means that they can emit light in unique ways when shaped and modulated by lasers.

In this work, the team found that the rate of light emission by electrons does not depend on the shape of the electron wave, while the quantum state of the emitted light does.

Essentially, this means that by changing the shape of the electron wave, they can control the characteristics of the light produced. The emitted light exhibits non-classical quantum properties, differing significantly from the light we encounter daily, which follows classical physics rules.

To produce a much stronger photon signal, the researchers also took advantage of superradiance, where multiple electrons emit light in a coordinated manner, resulting in a much stronger emission than the sum of individual emissions. Another purely quantum effect.

The excitement around this research is based on its potential to advance quantum computing and communication by providing new tools for controlling the many quantum states that are required to make them work.

It could also lead to the development of new light sources with special properties, useful in a whole range of scientific and technological applications.

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Quantum systems tend to become less “quantum-y” as they interact with their environment. So when developing a mathematical description, it’s usually simpler just to view them as being closed off from their surroundings.

But ‘open’ systems are more realistic and sometimes even more interesting. Open quantum systems can be modelled using the so-called Lindblad equation, which describes the quantum evolution with time as both energy and coherence are lost to the environment.

Scientists from Tsinghua University have expanded the Lindblad equation to track the time evolution in an open system of a quantum property that that has become the hottest topic in condensed-matter physics: topology. Topology has formed the basis of numerous exotic states of matter over the last few decades. Now researchers show that an open system can undergo a topological transition as a result of dissipation, or loss.

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Ensuring that different clocks are giving the same time is crucial to enable electronic systems to talk to each other. But what is the cost of this synchronisation at the thermodynamic level?

To answer this question, scientists from the East China Normal University in Shanghai studied two tiny resonating membranes inside an optical cavity. Such optomechanical systems can exhibit quantum properties even on a macroscopic scale, and so they’re an ideal platform for studying ultrasensitive metrology and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Each of the membranes represented a nanomechanical clock, and the two could be synchronised by increasing their coupling strength by adding more light to the cavity. In this way, the team was able to measure the dependence of the degree of synchronisation on the overall entropy cost.

They hope that this experimental investigation will serve as a starting point to explore synchronisation in navigation-satellite and fibre-optic systems with the aim of improving clock performance.

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The Earth is not a perfect sphere. This makes very precise modelling of our planet’s gravitational field rather tricky. To simplify the maths, scientists can consider a so-called Brillouin sphere: the smallest planet-centred sphere that completely encloses the mass composing the planet. In the case of the Earth, the Brillouin sphere touches the Earth at a single point—the top of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. The gravitational field outside the sphere can be accurately simulated by combining a series of simple equations called a spherical harmonic expansion.

But does this still hold true for the field inside the Brillouin sphere, which by definition includes the planet’s surface? Scientists from Ohio State University and the University of Connecticut say “no”. The team presented an analytical and numerical study that demonstrates clearly how and why the spherical harmonic expansion leads to prediction errors.

However, all is not lost. Their ultra-accurate simulations of the gravity field offer guidance toward a new mathematical foundation of gravity modelling. An upgraded simulator, which accounts for density variations within planets, will allow rigorous testing of proposed alternative ways to represent the gravity field beneath the Brillouin sphere.

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Periodic changes in celestial bodies provide astronomers with a great deal of information about the universe. Sporadic alterations in a star’s brightness could be a signature of it being part of a binary system or indicate the presence of an orbiting planet. And the periodic rotation of objects in the Kuiper Belt tells us about planet formation and the development of our solar system. But these changes are rarely perfectly regular, so astronomers have developed a range of statistical methods to characterize aperiodic observations.

Now, mathematical statisticians from North Carolina State University have compared the robustness of these various methods for the first time. The team investigated the success of four different methods using the same simulated data, and were able to develop a list of recommended usage and limitations that will be essential guidance for all observation astronomers.

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Are you in the field of AI for science? Now, you have a new place to share your latest work to the world.  IOP Publishing has partnered with the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in China to launch a new “diamond” open-access journal to showcase how artificial intelligence (AI) is driving scientific innovation. AI for Science (AI4S) will publish high-impact original research, reviews, and perspectives to highlight the transformative applications and impact of AI.

The launch of the interdisciplinary journal AI4S comes as AI technologies become increasingly integral to scientific research — from drug discovery to quantum computing and materials science.

AI is one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding areas of research so much so that in the last five years the topic has expanded by nearly ten times the rate of general scientific output.  

Gian-Marco Rignanese from École Polytechnique de Louvain (EPL) in Belgium, who is the editor-in-chief of Al4S, says he is “very excited” by AI’s transformative potential for science. “It is really disrupting the way research is being performed. AI excels at processing and analyzing large volumes of data quickly and accurately,” he says. “This capability enables researchers to gain insights – or identify patterns – that were previously difficult or impossible to obtain.”

Rignanese adds that AI is also accelerating simulations making them “closer to the real world” and large language models and neuro-linguistic programming are changing our way to apprehend the existing literature. “Generative AI holds a lot of promises,” he says.

Rignanese, whose research focuses on investigating and designing advanced materials for electronics, energy storage and energy production in which he uses first-principles simulations and machine learning, says that AI4S “not only targets high standards in terms of quality of the published research” but that it also recognizes the importance of sharing data and software.

The journal recognizes the rapid and multifaceted growth of AI. Notably, in 2025 both the chemistry and physics Nobel prizes went to the science of AI. Research funding is also increasing, with both the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) allocating more resources to this field in 2025 than ever before.

In China, AI is emerging as a major priority in which the science community is poised to become a driving force in global development. Reflecting this, AI4S is co-led by editor-in-chief Weihua Wang from the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory is a new and leading institute for advanced materials research and innovation that is preparing to focus intensively on AI in the near future.

“Our primary goal with AI for Science is to provide a global forum where scientists can share their cutting-edge research, innovative methodologies, and transformative perspectives,” says Wang “The field of AI in scientific research is not only expanding but also evolving at an unprecedented pace, making it vital for professionals to connect and collaborate.”

Wang expressed his optimistic vision for the future of AI in scientific research. “We want AI for Science to be instrumental in creating a more connected and collaborative global community of researchers,” he adds. “Together, we can harness the transformative power of AI to address some of the world’s most pressing scientific challenges and make the field even more impactful.”

Wang notes that the inspiration behind the journal is the potential impact of AI on scientific discovery. “We believe that AI has the power to revolutionize the way research is conducted,” he says. “By providing a space for open dialogue and collaboration, we hope to enable scientists to leverage AI technologies more effectively, ultimately accelerating innovation and improving outcomes across various fields.”

The scope of AI4S is broad yet focused, catering to a wide array of interests within the scientific community. Wang explains that the journal covers various topics. These include: AI algorithms adapted for scientific applications; AI software and toolkits designed specifically for researchers; the importance of AI-ready datasets; and the development of embodied AI systems. These topics aim to bridge the gap between AI technology and its applications across disciplines like materials science, biology, and chemistry.

AI4S is also setting new standards for author experience. Submissions are reviewed by an international editorial board together with the support of a 22-member advisory board composed of leading scientists and engineers. The journal also promises a rapid turnaround in which once accepted, articles are published within 24 hours and assigned a citable digital object identifier (DOI). In addition, from 2025 to 2027, all article publication charges are fully waived, paid for by the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory.

AI4S joins a growing number of journals focused on machine learning and AI. This includes the IOP’s Machine Learning Series: Machine Learning: Science and Technology; Machine Learning: Engineering; Machine Learning: Earth; and Machine Learning: Health.

“AI is a new approach to science which is really exciting and holds a lot of promises,” adds Rignanese, “so I am convinced that there is room for a journal accompanying this new paradigm.”

For more information or to submit your manuscript, click here.

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Ekaterina Shanina, a PhD student at the University of California, Davis, has won the Physics in Medicine & Biology Early Career Researcher Award for her research paper describing a novel brain phantom for positron emission tomography (PET).

Shanina’s study was chosen by Physics in Medicine & Biology’s editorial board as the “best paper” (based on the quality of scientific content and peer review ratings) in the journal’s Early Career Researcher Focus Collection 2024 – a programme established to support and highlight the work of emerging researchers in the medical physics and biomedical engineering community.

“The initiative recognises that early-career researchers often produce cutting-edge, high-impact work but may not yet have widespread visibility,” says Emma Harris, a guest editor on the collection. She explains that while the collection itself showcases a broad range of high-quality work, the award was introduced to further recognise an outstanding contribution from an early-career author – defined this year as someone who completed their PhD in 2018 or later.

“The award serves to highlight exceptional research that stands out for originality, rigour or impact,” says Harris, from the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden NHS Trust. “[It will] promote prestige and visibility to the awardee within the international research community, and provide a tangible form of encouragement and recognition that can support academic career progression.”

A new phantom for high-performance PET

In her award winning paper, PICASSO: a universal brain phantom for positron emission tomography based on the activity painting technique, Shanina describes a unique PET phantom called PICASSO and shows how it can be used to model realistic static and dynamic neuroimaging PET studies with excellent quantitative accuracy.

PET imaging offers an invaluable tool for studying the brain, prompting recent interest in developing advanced high-resolution PET scanners dedicated to brain imaging. Such developments create an associated requirement for appropriate imaging phantoms to evaluate and optimize scanner performance. The PICASSO phantom aims to meet these needs.

“UC Davis has been collaborating with Yale University and United Imaging Healthcare to develop a new high-performance brain PET scanner called the NeuroEXPLORER,” Shanina explains. “This scanner has high spatial resolution, which renders the most commonly used anthropomorphic brain phantom – the Hoffman phantom – unsuitable for evaluating its performance. At the same time, we wanted to explore the activity painting technique to create this unconventional phantom for PET imaging.”

Most physical PET phantoms need to be filled with a radioactive solution, which means that they can only model one type of tracer and making changes to the phantom structure is challenging. Such phantoms also require walls to separate different regions, which interferes with quantitative image evaluation, and designs with complex internal cavities are hard to fill without residual air bubbles.

“Our PICASSO phantom overcomes many of these limitations,” says Shanina.

It works by moving a ²²Na point source around within the field-of-view of a PET scanner to “paint” one high-statistics dataset. The motion of the radioactive source is controlled by a robotic arm and contrast levels are defined by computationally sampling the acquired dataset. This approach can efficiently generate phantoms with arbitrary static and dynamic activity distributions in the brain (or other body regions) using a single PET acquisition.

“PICASSO uses a single dataset acquired with a sealed point source to efficiently generate a variety of activity distributions of various complexities and with arbitrarily fine features,” Shanina explains. “There’s no need for cumbersome phantom preparation, there are no cold walls or air bubbles, and the data contain some of the scanner parameters that are difficult to model analytically. We can even use it to model dynamic studies, which is a very challenging task for conventional phantoms.”

Since the paper was published last year, Shanina and colleagues have extended the two-dimensional PICASSO phantom into a 3D version that can generate whole-brain images. “We are also working on an exciting new application for the phantom, using it to model different time-of-flight resolutions of PET scanners,” she says. “To our knowledge, you cannot do this with any other phantoms that are not simulations.”

Shanina tells Physics World that she is “honoured and humbled” to win the Early Career Researcher Award. “I am very happy that this work keeps attracting people’s attention and interest,” she says. “Of course, I don’t do this all by myself. I am very grateful to have Simon Cherry and Jinyi Qi as my advisors supporting and encouraging me on this journey.”

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Two distinctive features of materials known as quantum double-exchange ferromagnets are purely due to quantum spin effects and multiorbital physics, with no need for the lattice vibrations previously invoked to explain them. This theoretical result could lead to new insights into these technologically important materials, as it suggests that some of their properties may arise from interactions hitherto regarded as less important.

Quantum double-exchange ferromagnets have interested scientists since the late 1980s, when physicists led by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg found that their electrical resistance depends strongly on the magnitude of an external magnetic field. This phenomenon is known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR), and its discovery led to an enormous increase in the storage capacity of modern hard-disk drives, which incorporate GMR structures into their magnetic field sensors. It also led, in 2007, to a Nobel Prize for Fert and Grünberg.

Modelling strategies

Despite these successes, however, physicist Jacek Herbrych of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Wrocław University of Science and Technology in Poland, who led the new research effort, says that these materials remain somewhat mysterious. “They are theoretically complex, and even today, there is no exact solution to fully solve these systems,” he says.

The key question, Herbrych continues, is how Coulomb interactions between many individual electrons lead to the electron spins in these ferromagnets becoming aligned. “Physicists broadly distinguish two mechanisms,” he explains. “For insulating ferromagnets, the Goodenough-Kanamori rules (based on electron shell occupancy and geometrical arguments) can predict spin alignment. For metallic ferromagnets, the double-exchange mechanism is more appropriate.”

In this latter case, Herbrych explains, the electrons’ motion and the alignment of their spins are intrinsically linked, and the electrons often occupy multiple orbitals. This means they need to be modelled in a fundamentally different way.

The approach Herbrych and his colleagues took, which they describe in Rep. Prog. Phys., was conceptually simple, using a basic yet realistic model of interacting electrons to predict the quantum behaviour of electron spins. “In quantum mechanics, ‘simple’ can quickly become complex, however,” Herbrych notes. “Materials in which the double-exchange mechanism dominates typically exhibit multiorbital behaviour, as mentioned. A minimal model must therefore include electron mobility (or ‘itinerancy’), Coulomb interactions and orbital degrees of freedom.”

Two distinctive features

Herbrych and colleagues identified the two-orbital Hubbard-Kanamori model and the Kondo lattice model with interactions as fitting these requirements. They then used these models to explore two distinctive features of quantum double-exchange ferromagnets.

Both features involve magnons, which are collective oscillations of the materials’ spin magnetic moments. In basic “toy” models of ferromagnets, magnons exhibit a well-defined energy-momentum correspondence known as the dispersion relation. Quantum double-exchange ferromagnets, however, experience a phenomenon known as magnon mode softening: at short wavelengths, their magnons become nearly dispersionless, or momentum independent. “This implies that there are fundamental differences between long- and short-distance spin dynamics,” Herbrych says. “Magnons can travel over long distances but appear localized at short scales.”

The second distinctive feature is called magnon damping. This occurs when magnons lose coherence, meaning that the standard picture of spin flips propagating through the material’s lattice breaks down. “It was previously thought that Jahn-Teller phonons (lattice vibrations) were responsible for these features, and that a classical spin model with phonons would do, but our work challenges this view,” says Herbrych. “We show that these phenomena can arise purely from quantum spin effects and multiorbital physics, without requiring lattice vibrations.”

This is, he tells Physics World, “a remarkable result” as it suggests that some experimental features of quantum double-exchange ferromagnets may arise from interactions previously considered secondary.

Limitations and extensions

The researchers’ present work is restricted to one dimension, and they acknowledge that extending it to two or three dimensions will be a challenge. “Still, our approach offers a conceptual framework that can be approximately extended to higher dimensions,” Herbrych says. “The results not only provide insights into the physics of strongly correlated systems, but also into the interplay of competing phases, such as ferromagnetism, orbital order and superconductivity, observed in these materials.”

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• To hear the author read an extract from the diaries and reflect on the power of “flash fiction”, check out the Physics World Stories podcast.

The post Heisenberg (not) in Helgoland: where two paths diverge appeared first on Physics World.

As few as five electrons in a semiconductor can exhibit collective behaviour, forming a “Coulomb liquid”, according to researchers in Europe. This extends the study of correlated systems to electron plasmas, and could lead to the study of other exotic phases of matter.

A conventional plasma is a hot, ionized gas of free electrons and positive ions. However, the conduction band of a semiconductor can be considered a one-component plasma. “The effect of the positive charges, as they are locked into the lattice, can be modelled as a uniform background of positive charge,” says team member Vyacheslavs Kashcheyevs of the University of Latvia in Riga. In conventional electronics and semiconductor physics, the conduction band is modelled as a 2D Fermi gas of non-interacting particles, with the Coulomb interaction between the electrons neglected.

The new work focused on electron–electron correlations in the conduction band of gallium arsenide at millikelvin temperatures. The team created a Y-shaped junction. Electrons emitted from a quantum dot were steered through the device by an externally-generated surface acoustic wave (SAW) potential. Part-way through, the path divided, and each electron could either go left or right. The number taking each path was measured by separate quantum dots. The researchers are uncertain, and the model is agnostic, about the extent to which the randomness of left or right arose from quantum mechanics.

When no more than one electron was loaded into each potential minimum, each electron’s choice was random, and the number of electrons counted at each detector after multiple trials could be modelled by a binomial distribution. However, when the researchers tuned the apparatus such that each minimum contained multiple electrons, they found changes in the distribution, with groups of particles less likely to travel to the same detector than would be naïvely expected.

Calculating “cumulants”

The researchers quantified the changes in the distributions using probability theory, calculating “cumulants” of the distributions. “We not only have a cumulant of order two, which would say that two particles are repulsing,” says Hermann Sellier of Institut Néel in Grenoble, France, who led the experimental research. “We have a cumulant of order four for four particles or five for five particles, showing that each particle is talking to all the other particles of the droplet. That’s much stronger and something that has not been measured before.”

This shows, say the researchers, that the 2D electron gas condenses into a strongly correlated Coulomb liquid. This a phase of matter seen in quark–gluon plasma, which is created by the high-energy collision of heavy ions, but never previously identified in electronic matter.

“It’s not like you have atoms which, below a certain temperature, go from the gas phase to the liquid phase because of an attractive interaction,” explains Sellier. “We say that the correlated behaviour is like that of a liquid, but a very special liquid made of repulsive interactions. You push on the right, it pushes on the left.” This is possible only at low temperatures because heating increases the entropy to the point where the correlated state of matter is disfavoured.

The team now wants to look at larger systems approaching the macroscopic limit. They believe similar systems could potentially be used to study many-body physics with other, exotic particles such as anyons – quasiparticles that have properties intermediate to bosons and fermions. Potential technological applications include cold atom quantum simulation.

Considerable interest

Ravi Rau of Louisiana State University in the US says, “It is an interesting method, novel to me, of controlling electron droplets and being able to measure correlations of two, three and up to a maximum of five-particles so far, and addressing the general question of the transition in few-body systems to the statistical limit from explicit dynamics when the number of particles is small”. He adds, “This study, such a system, and the results presented will of course be of considerable interest.”

Rau does however, note that very similar results were achieved in the past in studies of electron collisions with cold atoms and molecules. “[That technique] went under the name of COLTRIMS (cold target recoil-ion momentum spectroscopy) allowed measuring multiple differential cross sections and studying electron–electron correlations in atoms,” he says. “It was the exact analogue of this [work], except that instead of an artificially created and controlled droplet cluster, the electrons were naturally inside the atom.”

The researchers acknowledge the similarity, and thank Rau for bringing the previous work to their attention. However, Kashcheyevs argues that the new work has a generality that allows it to tackle new problems, finding the scaling law that connects the properties of individual electrons to the properties of incompressible Coulomb plasma. “Applying our method at lower temperatures in the future can probe the quantum regime of the phase diagram of this electronic fluid, which is known to support exotic quasiparticles impossible in the 3D vacuum of the Standard Model,” he says.

The research is described in Nature.

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New observations support the idea that hot, diffuse threads of gas called cosmic filaments connect clusters of galaxies across the cosmos. That is the conclusion of Konstantinos Migkas at Leiden University and colleagues who say that their study strengthens the idea that much of the normal matter in the universe resides in these structures.

About 5% of the universe’s mass–energy content appears to be baryonic matter – the familiar nuclei and particles that make up atoms and molecules. The rest is believed to be dark energy and dark matter, which are both hypothetical entities. Although they know what baryonic matter is, astronomers have a poor understanding of where much of it is distributed in the universe.

Combining the Standard Model of cosmology with the rigid constraints enforced by observations of cosmic microwave background radiation tells us that structures including stars, black holes, and gas clouds account for around 60% of baryonic matter in the universe. This leaves 40% of baryonic matter unaccounted for.

Previously, cosmologists have argued that this discrepancy could point to a fundamental error in the Standard Model. Recently, however, a growing body of evidence suggests that this matter could be found in vast yet elusive structures, hidden deep within intergalactic space.

On a WHIM

“Large-scale structure simulations of the universe tell us this material should reside within long strings of gas called ‘cosmic filaments’, which connect clusters of galaxies,” Migkas explains. “These missing baryons should be found in the so-called ‘warm-hot intergalactic medium’ (WHIM).”

Despite being extremely sparse, models also predict that the WHIM should be extremely hot – primarily heated by shock waves produced as matter collapses into the large-scale cosmic web, as well as by phenomena including active galactic nuclei and mergers between galaxy clusters. As a result, these cosmic filaments should be emitting a faint yet detectable X-ray signal.

On top of this, the Standard Model places tight theoretical constraints on several physical properties of the WHIM – including its density, temperature, and composition. If X-rays are indeed being emitted by cosmic filaments, these properties should be encoded in their energies, intensities, and frequency spectra – providing astronomers with a clear target in their search for the elusive structures.

These X-ray signals have so far evaded detection because they are extremely faint compared to powerful X-ray signals such as those coming from supermassive black holes

To overcome this, researchers combined data from two of the world’s most advanced X-ray observatories. One is the Suzaku satellite, which was jointly operated by JAXA and NASA and was very good at detecting very faint signals. The other is the ESA’s XMM-Newton, which is very good at observing powerful X-ray signals.

Eliminating black holes

“Combining the two instruments, we carefully and appropriately eliminated the contaminating signal of the black holes throughout our filament,” Migkas explains. “This enabled us to isolate the signal of WHIM and measure its density and temperature for the very first time with such accuracy.”

For an observational target, Migkas’ team searched for cosmic filaments in the Shapley supercluster. This vast structure around 650 million light-years from the Milky Way contains one of the highest concentrations of galaxies in the known universe.

With the combined abilities of Suzaku and XMM-Newton, the researchers detected an X-ray signal indicating the presence of a filament – consistent with predictions of the Standard Model. As they expected, this intergalactic material was extremely hot and sparse: boasting temperatures close to 10 million Kelvin, while containing just around 10 electrons per cubic metre.

“We also found that on average, the filament is around 40 times denser than the average density of the universe – which is pretty empty in general – and around 1000 times less dense than the cores of the four-galaxy cluster it connects,” Migkas describes. Despite having gone undetected so far, this filament also carries a total mass around 10 times that of the Milky Way – making it a vast reservoir of previously hidden matter.

“For the very first time, our work confirms the validity of the predictions of the Standard Model of cosmology regarding the properties of a big part of the missing baryons,” Migkas concludes.

The research is described in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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What skills do you use every day in your job?

Beyond the technical skills tied to specific aspects of my research, my work involves continuously engaging a balance of creativity, critical thinking and curiosity. Creativity alone isn’t enough – in physics, ideas must ultimately stand up to scrutiny. Something is either right or it isn’t, so the goal is to let your imagination run free, while keeping it anchored to scientific rigour.

This balance becomes especially important when it comes to defining your own research direction. Early in your career, you’re usually handed a problem to work on. But, over time, you have to learn to ask your own questions, and formulating good ones is much harder than it sounds.

In the beginning, most of the ideas you come up with turn out either to be flawed or have already been explored. The alternative is to stay in safe territory and do incremental work, which certainly has its place, but it’s difficult to build a research career on that alone.

What helps is staying curious. Finding a meaningful research question often means diving into unfamiliar literature, following sparks of interest, and carving out time to read and think critically. It also means being open to inspiration from other people’s work, not just from research that overlaps with your own, but potentially from entirely different areas.

To me, one of the most precious traits in research is the ability to keep your curiosity alive

I’ve seen how easy it can be to fall into the trap of only valuing ideas that align with your own. To me, one of the most precious traits in research is the ability to keep your curiosity alive: to remain open to surprise, ready to recognize when you’re wrong, be willing to learn, and to be excited by someone else’s discovery, even when it has nothing to do with your own work.

What do you like best and least about your job?

What I like best is the freedom. I get to choose what my next research project will be about, and sometimes that process starts in the simplest of ways. I see an exciting talk at a conference, become fascinated by a new idea, and find myself reading everything I can about it. I’ll come back, pitch it to a student, and if they’re excited too, we explore it together.

When I start something new, I often feel like an imposter, venturing into foreign territory and trying to operate as if I know my way around, but as time goes on, things start to fall into place. Eventually, you reach the point where you create something new that others in the field may find interesting or inspiring in turn. That moment – when a once-distant topic becomes something you have actually contributed to – is deeply rewarding.

What I like least is answering e-mails. As a student, I couldn’t understand why some professors took ages to reply. Now I do. Some days, my inbox just fills up endlessly, and responding thoughtfully to every message would take the whole day. It’s a balancing act, deciding when to say yes and when to say no, and learning to say no in a considerate and fair way takes time and emotional energy. You want to be generous with your time, especially when someone genuinely needs help, but finding this balance can be exhausting. It’s an important part of the job, but I wish it took up a bit less space.

What do you know today that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?

That everyone feels like an imposter sometimes. When I started out as a student, I looked around and assumed everyone else was an expert, while I was just trying to find my way, painfully aware of how much I didn’t know. Over time, you do gain confidence in certain areas, but research constantly pushes you in new directions. That means learning new things, starting from scratch, and feeling like an imposter all over again.

The first time I heard the term “imposter syndrome”, it felt like a revelation. Just knowing that this feeling had a name, and that others experienced it too, was validating. Does this mean I feel less like an imposter now? Not really. But I’ve come to understand that it’s part of the process. It means I’m still learning, still being challenged, still exploring new directions. And if that feeling never goes away entirely, maybe that’s a good sign.

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