The Helgoland 2025 meeting, marking 100 years of quantum mechanics, has featured a lot of mind-bending fundamental physics, quite a bit of which has left me scratching my head.

So it was great to hear a brilliant talk by David Moore of Yale University about some amazing practical experiments using levitated, trapped microspheres as quantum sensors to detect what he calls the “invisible” universe.

If the work sounds familar to you, that’s because Moore’s team won a Physics World Top 10 Breakthrough of the Year award in 2024 for using their technique to detect the alpha decay of individual lead-212 atoms.

Speaking in the Nordseehalle on the island of Helgoland, Moore explained the next stage of the experiment, which could see it detect neutrinos “in a couple of months” at the earliest – and “at least within a year” at the latest.

Of course, physicists have already detected neutrinos, but it’s a complicated business, generally involving huge devices in deep underground locations where background signals are minimized. Yale’s set up is much cheaper, smaller and more convenient, involving no more than a couple of lab benches.

As Moore explained, he and his colleagues first trap silica spheres at low pressure, before removing excess electrons to electrically neutralize them. They then stabilize the spheres’ rotation before cooling them to microkelvin temperatures.

In the work that won the Physics World award last year, the team used samples of radon-220, which decays first into polonium-216 and then lead-212. These nuclei embed theselves in the silica spheres, which recoil when the lead-212 decays by releasing an alpha particle (Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 023602).

Moore’s team is able to measure the tiny recoil by watching how light scatters off the spheres. “We can see the force imparted by a subatomic particle on a heavier object,” he told the audience at Helgoland. “We can see single nuclear decays.”

Now the plan is to extend the experiment to detect neutrinos. These won’t (at least initially) be the neutrinos that stream through the Earth from the Sun or even those from a nuclear reactor.

Instead, the idea will be to embed the spheres with nuclei that undergo beta decay, releasing a much lighter neutrino in the process. Moore says the team will do this within a year and, one day, potentially even use to it spot dark matter.

“We are reaching the quantum measurement regime,” he said. It’s a simple concept, even if the name – “Search for new Interactions in a Microsphere Precision Levitation Experiment” (SIMPLE) – isn’t.

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I’ve been immersed in quantum physics this week at the Helgoland 2025 meeting, which is being held to mark Werner Heisenberg’s seminal development of quantum mechanics on the island 100 years ago.

But when it comes to science, Helgoland isn’t only about quantum physics. It’s also home to an outpost of the Alfred Wegener Institute, which is part of the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and named after the German scientist who was the brains behind continental drift.

Dating back to 1892, the Biological Institute Helgoland (BAH) has about 80 permanent staff. They include Sebastian Primpke, a polymer scientist who studies the growing danger of microplastics and microfibres on the oceans.

Microplastics, which are any kind of small plastic materials, generally range in size from one micron to about 5 mm. They are a big danger for fish and other forms of marine life, as Marric Stephens reported in this recent feature.

Primpke studies microplastics using biofilms attached to a grid immersed in a tank containing water piped continuously in from the North Sea. The tank is covered with a lid to keep samples in the dark, mimicking underwater conditions.

He and his team periodically take samples from the films out, studying them in the lab using infrared and Raman microscopes. They’re able to obtain information such as the length, width, area, perimeter of individual microplastic particles as well as how convex or concave they are.

Other researchers at the Hegloland lab study microfibres, which can come from cellulose and artificial plastics, using electron microscopy. You can find out more information about the lab’s work here.

Primpke, who is a part-time firefighter, has lived and worked on Helgoland for a decade. He says it’s a small community, where everyone knows everyone else, which has its good and bad sides.

With only 1500 residents on the island, which lies 50 km from the mainland, finding good accommodation can be tricky. But with so many tourists, there are more amenities than you’d expect of somewhere of that size.

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Jack Harris, a quantum physicist at Yale University in the US, has a fascination with islands. He grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, an island just south of Cape Cod on the east coast of America, and believes that islands shape a person’s thinking. “Your world view has a border – you’re on or you’re off,” Harris said on a recent episode of the Physics World Stories podcast.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Harris is one of the main organizers of a five-day conference taking place this week on Helgoland, where Werner Heisenberg discovered quantum mechanics exactly a century ago. Heisenberg had come to the tiny, windy, pollen-free island, which lies 50 km off the coast of Germany, in June 1925, to seek respite from the hay fever he was suffering from in Göttingen.

According to Heisenberg’s 1971 book Physics and Beyond, he supposedly made his breakthrough early one morning that month. Unable to sleep, Heisenberg left his guest house just before daybreak and climbed a tower at the top of the island’s southern headland. As the Sun rose, Heisenberg pieced together the curious observations of frequencies of light that materials had been seen to absorb and emit.

While admitting that the real history of the episode isn’t as simple as Heisenberg made out, Harris believes it’s nevertheless a “very compelling” story. “It has a place and a time: an actual, clearly defined, quantized discrete place – an island,” Harris says. “This is a cool story to have as part of the fabric of [the physics] community.” Hardly surprising, then, that more than 300 physicists, myself included, have travelled from across the world to the Helgoland 2025 meeting.

Much time has been spent so far at the event discussing the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which might seem a touch self-indulgent and esoteric given the burgeoning  (and financially lucrative) applications of the subject. Do we really need to concern ourselves with, say, non-locality, the meaning of measurement, or the nature of particles, information and randomness?

Why did we need to hear from Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton getting so excited talking about information loss and black holes? (Fun fact: a “white” black hole the size of a bacterium would, he claimed, be as hot as the Sun and emit so much light we could see it with the naked eye.)

But the fundamental questions are fascinating in their own right. What’s more, if we want to build, say, a quantum computer, it’s not just a technical and engineering endeavour. “To make it work you have to absorb a lot of the foundational topics of quantum mechanics,” says Harris, pointing to challenges such as knowing what kinds of information alter how a system behaves. “We’re at a point where real-word practical things like quantum computing, code breaking and signal detection hinge on our ability to understand the foundational questions of quantum mechanics.”

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The first session at the Helgoland 2025 meeting marking the centenary of quantum mechanics began with the four Nobel-prize-winning physicsts in attendance being invited on stage to sign the island’s memorial “gold book” and add a short statement to it.

Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize with John Clauser for their work on entanglement and quantum information science, were first up on stage. They were followed by Serge Haroche and David Wineland, who shared the 2012 prize for their work on measuring and manipulating quantum systems.

During the coffee break, the book was placed on display for participants to view and add their own signatures if they wished. Naturally, being the nosey person I am, I was keen to see what the Nobel laureates had written.

Here, for the record, are their comments.

“Great sailing. Great people.” Anton Zeilinger

“C’est une émotion de se trouver à l’endroit où a commencé la méchanique quantique.” Alain Aspect [It’s an emotional feeling to find yourself in the place where quantum mechanics started.]

“Thank you for your warm welcome in Helgoland, an island which is known by all quantum physicists.” Serge Haroche

“An honor to be here.” David Wineland

All the comments made sense to me apart from that of Zeilinger so after the evening’s panel debate on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in which he had taken part, I asked him what the reference to sailing was all about.

Turns out that Zeilinger (as Albert Einstein once was) is a keen sailor in his spare time and he and his wife had come to Helgoland three days before the conference began to see the final stages of a North Sea regatta that takes place in late spring every year.

In fact, Zeilinger explained that the Helgoland meeting had to start on a Tuesday as the day before the venue was host to the regatta’s awards ceremony.

As for the flag, it is that of Helgoland, with the green representing the land, the red for the island’s cliffs and the white for the sand on the beaches.

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“This is a birthday party! Happy 100th birthday quantum mechanics,” said Jack Harris from Yale University in the US to whoops and cheers in the banqueting suite of the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg, Germany.

Harris was addressing the 300 or so physicists attending the Helgoland 2025 conference, which is taking place from 9–14 June to mark Werner Heisenberg’s seminal work on quantum mechanics on the island of Helgoland in the North Sea exactly 100 years ago.

“Heisenberg travelled to Helgoland to escape terrible allergies” Harris told delegates, reminding them of how the young 23-year-old had taken leave of absence from his postdoc supervisor Max Born in Göttingen for the fresh air of the treeless island. “His two weeks there was one of the watershed events in the discovery of quantum mechanics.”

Harris admitted, though, that it’s open to debate if Heisenberg’s fortnight on the island was as significant as is often made out, joking that – like quantum mechanics itself – “there are many interpretations that one can apply to this occasion”.

In one interpretation I hadn’t considered before, Harris pointed out that what might be regarded as an impediment or a disability – Heisenberg’s severe hayfever – turned out to be a positive force for science. “It actually brought him to Helgoland in the first place.”

Harris also took the opportunity to remind the audience of the importance of mentoring and helping each other in science. “How we treat others is as important as what we accomplish”, he said. “Another high standard to keep in mind is that science needs to be international and science needs to be inclusive. I am preaching to the choir but this is important to say out loud.”

Harris’s opening remarks were followed a series of three talks. First was Douglas Stone from Yale University who discussed the historical development of quantum science.

Next up was philosopher of science Elise Crull from the City University of New York, who looked into some of the early debates about the philosophical implications of quantum physics – including the pioneering contributions of Grete Hermann, who Sidney Perkowitz discussed in his recent feature for Physics World.

The final after-dinner speaker was science journalist Philip Ball, who explained how quantum theory developed in 1924–25 in the run-up to Helgoland. He focused, as he did in his recent feature for Physics World, on work carried out by Niels Bohr and others that turned out to be wrong but showed the intense turmoil in physics on the brink of quantum mechanics.

Helgoland 2025 features a packed five days of talks, poster sessions and debates – on the island of Helgoland itself – covering the past, present and future of quantum physics, with five Nobel laureates in attendance. In fact, Harris and his fellow scientific co-organizers – Časlav Brukner, Steven Girvin and Florian Marquardt – had so much to squeeze in that they could easily have “filled two or three solid programmes with people from whom we would have loved to hear”.

I’ll see over the next few days on Helgoland if they made the right speaker choices, but things have certainly got off to a good start.

• Elise Crull is appearing on the next episode of Physics World Live on Tueday 17 June. You can register for free at this link.

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