While much insight has been gleaned from how grasshoppers hop, their gliding prowess has mostly been overlooked. Now researchers at Princeton University have studied how these gangly insects deploy and retract their wings to inspire a new approach to flying robots.

Typical insect-inspired robot designs are often based on bees and flies. They feature constant flapping motion, yet that requires a lot of power so the robots either carry heavy batteries or are tethered to a power supply.

Grasshoppers, however, are able to jump and glide as well as flap their wings and while they are not the best gliding insect, they have another trick as they are able to retract and unfurl their wings.

Grasshoppers have two sets of wings, the forewings and hindwings. The front wing is mainly used for protection and camouflage while the hindwing is used for flight. The hindwing is corrugated, which allows it to fold in neatly like an accordion.

A team of engineers, biologists and entomologists analysed the wings of the American grasshopper, also known as the bird grasshopper, due to its superior flying skills. They took CT scans of the insects and then used the findings to 3D-print model wings. They attached these wings to small frames to create grasshopper-inspired gliders, finding that their performance was on par with that of actual grasshoppers.

The team also tweaked certain wing features such as the shape, camber and corrugation, finding that a smooth wing produced gliding that was more efficient and repeatable than one with corrugations. “This showed us that these corrugations might have evolved for other reasons,” notes Princeton engineer Aimy Wissa, who adds that “very little” is known about how grasshoppers deploy their wings.

The researchers say that further work could result in new ways to extend the flight time for insect-sized robots without the need for heavy batteries or tethering. “This grasshopper research opens up new possibilities not only for flight, but also for multimodal locomotion,” adds Lee. “By combining biology with engineering, we’re able to build and ideate on something completely new.”

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Chess is a seemingly simple game, but one that hides incredible complexity. In the standard game, the starting positions of the pieces are fixed so top players rely on memorizing a plethora of opening moves, which can sometimes result in boring, predictable games. It’s also the case that playing as white, and therefore going first, offers an advantage.

In the 1990s, former chess world champion Bobby Fischer proposed another way to play chess to encourage more creative play.

This form of the game – dubbed Chess960 – keeps the pawns in the same position but randomizes where the pieces at the back of the board – the knights, bishops, rooks, king and queen – are placed at the start while keeping the rest of the rules the same. It is named after the 960 starting positions that result from mixing it up at the back.

It was thought that Chess960 could allow for more permutations that would make the game fairer for both players. Yet research by physicist Marc Barthelemy at Paris-Saclay University suggests it’s not as simple as this.

Initial advantage

He used the open-source chess program called Stockfish to analyse each of the 960 starting positions and developed a statistical method to measure decision-making complexity by calculating how much “information” a player needs to identify the best moves.

He found that the standard game can be unfair, as players with black pieces who go second have to keep up with the moves from the player with white.

Yet regardless of starting positions at the back, Barthelemy discovered that white still has an advantage in almost all – 99.6% – of the 960 positions. He also found that the standard set-up – rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook – is nothing special and is presumably an historical accident possibly as the starting positions are easy to remember, being visually symmetrical.

“Standard chess, despite centuries of cultural evolution, does not occupy an exceptional location in this landscape: it exhibits a typical initial advantage and moderate total complexity, while displaying above-average asymmetry in decision difficulty,” writes Barthelemy.

For a more fair and balanced match, Barthelemy suggests playing position #198, which has the starting positions as queen, knight, bishop, rook, king, bishop, knight and rook.

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From cutting onions to a LEGO Jodrell Bank, physics has had its fair share of quirky stories this year. Here is our pick of the best, not in any particular order.

Flight of the nematode

Researchers in the US this year discovered that a tiny jumping worm uses static electricity to increase its chances of attaching to unsuspecting prey. The parasitic roundworm Steinernema carpocapsae can leap some 25 times its body length by curling into a loop and springing in the air. If the nematode lands successfully on a victim, it releases bacteria that kills the insect within a couple of days upon which  the worm feasts and lays its eggs. To investigate whether static electricity aids their flight, a team at Emory University and the University of California, Berkeley, used high-speed microscopy to film the worms as they leapt onto a fruit fly that was tethered with a copper wire connected to a high-voltage power supply. The researchers found that a charge of a  few hundred volts – similar to that generated in the wild by an insect’s wings rubbing against ions in the air – fosters a negative charge on the worm, creating an attractive force with the positively charged fly. They discovered that without any electrostatics, only 1 in 19 worm trajectories successfully reached their target. The greater the voltage, however, the greater the chance of landing with 880 V resulting in an 80% probability of success. “We’re helping to pioneer the emerging field of electrostatic ecology,” notes Emory physicist Ranjiangshang Ran.

Tear-jerking result

While it is known that volatile chemicals released from onions irritate the nerves in the cornea to produce tears, how such chemical-laden droplets reach the eyes and whether they are influenced by the knife or cutting technique remain less clear. To investigate, Sunghwan Jung  from Cornell University and colleagues built a guillotine-like apparatus and used high-speed video to observe the droplets released from onions as they were cut by steel blades. They found that droplets, which can reach up to 60 cm high, were released in two stages – the first being a fast mist-like outburst that was followed by threads of liquid fragmenting into many droplets. The most energetic droplets were released during the initial contact between the blade and the onion’s skin. When they began varying the sharpness of the blade and the cutting speed, they discovered that a greater number of droplets were released by blunter blades and faster cutting speeds. “That was even more surprising,” notes Jung. “Blunter blades and faster cuts – up to 40 m/s – produced significantly more droplets with higher kinetic energy.” Another surprise was that refrigerating the onions prior to cutting also produced an increased number of droplets of similar velocity, compared to room-temperature vegetables.

LEGO telescope

Students at the University of Manchester in the UK created a 30 500-piece LEGO model of the iconic Lovell Telescope to mark the 80th anniversary of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, which was founded in December 1945. Built in 1957, the 76.2 m diameter telescope was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world at the time. The LEGO model has been designed by Manchester’s undergraduate physics society and is based on the telescope’s original engineering blueprints. Student James Ruxton spent six months perfecting the design, which even involved producing custom-designed LEGO bricks with a 3D printer. Ruxton and fellow students began construction in April and the end result is a model weighing 30 kg with 30500 pieces and a whopping 4000-page instruction manual. “It’s definitely the biggest and most challenging build I’ve ever done, but also the most fun,” says Ruxton. “I’ve been a big fan of LEGO since I was younger, and I’ve always loved creating my own models, so recreating something as iconic as the Lovell is like taking that to the next level!” The model has gone on display in a “specially modified cabinet” at the university’s Schuster building, taking pride of place alongside a decade-old LEGO model of CERN’s ATLAS detector.

Petal physics

The curves and curls of leaves and flower petals arise due to the interplay between their natural growth and geometry. Uneven growth in a flat sheet, in which the edges grow quicker than the interior, gives rise to strain and in plant leaves and petals, for example, this can result in a variety of shapes such as saddle and ripple shapes. Yet when it comes to rose petals, the sharply pointed cusps – a point where two curves meet – that form at the edge of the petals set it apart from soft, wavy patterns seen in many other plants.

To investigate this intriguing difference, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem carried out theoretical modelling and conducted a series of experiments with synthetic disc “petals”. They found that the pointed cusps that form at the edge of rose petals are due to a type of geometric frustration called a Mainardi–Codazzi–Peterson (MCP) incompatibility. This type of mechanism results in stress concentrating in a specific area, which goes on to form cusps to avoid tearing or forming unnatural folding. When the researchers suppressed the formation of cusps, they found that the discs revert to being smooth and concave. The researchers say that the findings could be used for applications in soft robotics and even in the deployment of spacecraft components.

Wild Card physics

The Wild Cards universe is a series of novels set largely during an alternate history of the US following the Second World War. The series follows events after an extraterrestrial virus, known as the Wild Card virus, has spread worldwide. It mutates human DNA causing profound changes in human physiology. The virus follows a fixed statistical distribution in that 90% of those infected die, 9% become physically mutated (referred to as “jokers”) and 1% gain superhuman abilities (known as “aces”). Such capabilities include the ability to fly as well as being able to move between dimensions. George R R Martin, the author who co-edits the Wild Cards series, co-authored a paper examining the complex dynamics of the Wild Card virus together with Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical physicist Ian Tregillis, who is also a science-fiction author. The model takes into consideration the severity of the changes (for the 10% that don’t instantly die) and the mix of joker/ace traits. The result is a dynamical system in which a carrier’s state vector constantly evolves through the model space – until their “card” turns. At that point the state vector becomes fixed and its permanent location determines the fate of the carrier. “The fictional virus is really just an excuse to justify the world of Wild Cards, the characters who inhabit it, and the plot lines that spin out from their actions,” says Tregillis.

Foamy top

And finally, a clear sign of a good brew is a big head of foam at the top of a poured glass. Beer foam is made of many small bubbles of air, separated from each other by thin films of liquid. These thin films must remain stable, or the bubbles will pop, and the foam will collapse. What holds these thin films together is not completely understood and is likely conglomerates of proteins, surface viscosity or the presence of surfactants – molecules that can reduce surface tension and are found in soaps and detergents. To find out more, researchers from ETH Zurich and Eindhoven University of Technology investigated beer-foam stability for different types of beers at varying stages of the fermentation process. They found that for single-fermentation beers, the foams are mostly held together with the surface viscosity of the beer. This is mostly influenced by the proteins in the beer – the more they contain, the more viscous the film and more stable the foam will be. However, for double-fermented beers, the proteins in the beer are slightly denatured by the yeast cells and come together to form a two-dimensional membrane that keeps the foam intact longer. The head was found to be even more stable for triple-fermented beers, which include Trappist beers. The team says that the work could be used to identify ways to increase or decrease the amount of foam so that everyone can pour a perfect glass of beer every time. Cheers!

You can be sure that 2026 will throw up its fair share of quirky stories from the world of physics. See you next year!

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A total of 14 physics-based firms in sectors from quantum and energy to healthcare and aerospace have won 2025 Business Awards from the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World. The awards were presented at a reception in the Palace of Westminster yesterday attended by senior parliamentarians and policymakers as well as investors, funders and industry leaders.

The IOP Business Awards, which have been running since 2012, recognise the role that physics and physicists play in the economy, creating jobs and growth “by powering innovation to meet the challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to better healthcare and food production”. More than 100 firms have now won Business Awards, with around 90% of those companies still commercially active.

The parliamentary event honouring the 2025 winners were hosted by Dave Robertson, the Labour MP for Lichfield, who spent 10 years as a physics teacher in Birmingham before working for teaching unions. There was also a speech from Baron Sharma, who studied applied physics before moving into finance and later becoming a Conservative MP, Cabinet minister and president of the COP-26 climate summit.

Seven firms were awarded 2025 IOP Business Innovation Awards, which recognize companies that have “delivered significant economic and/or societal impact through the application of physics”. They include Oxford-based Tokamak Energy, which has developed “compact, powerful, robust, quench-resilient” high-temperature superconducting magnets for commercial fusion energy and for  propulsion systems, accelerators and scientific instruments.

Oxford Instruments was honoured for developing a novel analytical technique for scanning electron microscopes, enabling new capabilities and accelerating time to results by at least an order of magnitude. Ionoptika, meanwhile, was recognized for developing Q-One, which is a new generation of focused ion-beam instrumentation, providing single atom through to high-dose nanoscale advanced materials engineering for photonic and quantum technologies.

The other four winners were: electronics firm FlexEnable for their organic transistor materials; Lynkeos Technology for the development of muonography in the nuclear industry; the renewable energy company Sunamp for their thermal storage system; and the defence and security giant Thales UK for the development of a solid-state laser for laser rangefinders.

Business potential

Six other companies have won an IOP Start-up Award, which celebrates young companies “with a great business idea founded on a physics invention, with the potential for business growth and significant societal impact”. They include Astron Systems for developing “long-lifetime turbomachinery to enable multi-reuse small rocket engines and bring about fully reusable small launch vehicles”, along with MirZyme Therapeutics for “pioneering diagnostics and therapeutics to eliminate preeclampsia and transform maternal health”.

The other four winners were: Celtic Terahertz Technology for a metamaterial filter technology; Nellie Technologies for a algae-based carbon removal technology; Quantum Science for their development of short-wave infrared quantum dot technology; and Wayland Additive for the development and commercialisation of charge-neutralised electron beam metal additive manufacturing.

James McKenzie, a former vice-president for business at the IOP, who was involved in judging the awards, says that all awardees are “worthy winners”. “It’s the passion, skill and enthusiasm that always impresses me,” McKenzie told Physics World.

iFAST Diagnostics were also awarded the IOP Lee Lucas Award that recognises early-stage companies taking innovative products into the medical and healthcare sector. The firm, which was spun out of the University of Southampton, develops blood tests that can test the treatment of bacterial infections in a matter of hours rather than days. They are expecting to have approval for testing next year.

“Especially inspiring was the team behind iFAST,” adds McKenzie, “who developed a method to test very rapid tests cutting time from 48 hours to three hours, so patients can be given the right antibiotics.”

“The award-winning businesses are all outstanding examples of what can be achieved when we build upon the strengths we have, and drive innovation off the back of our world-leading discovery science,” noted Tom Grinyer, IOP chief executive officer. “In the coming years, physics will continue to shape our lives, and we have some great strengths to build upon here in the UK, not only in specific sectors such as quantum, semiconductors and the green economy, but in our strong academic research and innovation base, our growing pipeline of spin-out and early-stage companies, our international collaborations and our growing venture capital community.”

For the full list of winners, see here.

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Fermilab has officially opened a new building named after the particle physicist Helen Edwards. Officials from the lab and the US Department of Energy (DOE) opened the Helen Edwards Engineering Research Center at a ceremony held on 5 December.  The new building is the lab’s largest purpose-built lab and office space since the lab’s iconic Wilson Hall, which was completed in 1974.

Construction of the Helen Edwards Engineering Research Center began in 2019 and was completed three years later. The centre is an 7500 m² multi-story lab and office building that is adjacent and connected to Wilson Hall.

The new centre is designed as a collaborative lab where engineers, scientists and technicians design, build and test technologies across several areas of research such as neutrino science, particle detectors, quantum science and electronics.

The centre also features cleanrooms, vibration-sensitive labs and cryogenic facilities in which the components of the near detector for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will be assembled and tested.

A pioneering spirit

With a PhD in experimental particle physics from Cornell University, Edwards was heavily involved with commissioning the university’s 10 GeV electron synchrotron. In 1970 Fermilab’s director Robert Wilson appointed Edwards as associate head of the lab’s booster section and she later became head of the accelerator division.

While at Fermilab, Edwards’ primary responsibility was designing, constructing, commissioning and operating the Tevatron, which led to the discoveries of the top quark in 1995 and the tau neutrino in 2000.

Edwards retired in the early 1990s but continued to work as guest scientists at Fermilab and officially switched the Tevatron off during a ceremony held on 30 September 2011. Edwards died in 2016.

Darío Gil, the undersecretary for science at the DOE says that Edwards’ scientific work “is a symbol of the pioneering spirit of US research”.

“Her contributions to the Tevatron and the lab helped the US become a world leader in the study of elementary particles,” notes Gil. “We honour her legacy by naming this research centre after her as Fermilab continues shaping the next generation of research using [artificial intelligence], [machine learning] and quantum physics.”

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Almost every image that will be taken by future space observatories in low-Earth orbit could be tainted due to light contamination from satellites. That is according to a new analysis from researchers at NASA, which stresses that light pollution from satellites orbiting Earth must be reduced to guarantee astronomical research is not affected.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth has increased from about 2000 in 2019 to 15 000 today. Many of these are part of so-called mega-constellations that provide services such as Internet coverage around the world, including in areas that were previously unable to access it. Examples of such constellations include SpaceX’s Starlink as well as Amazon’s Kuiper and Eutelsat’s OneWeb.

Many of these mega-constellations share the same space as space-based observatories such as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This means that the telescopes can capture streaks of reflected light from the satellites that render the images or data completely unusable for research purposes. That is despite anti-reflective coating that is applied to some newer satellites in SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, for example.

Previous work has explored the impact of such satellites constellations on ground-based astronomy, both optical and radioastronomy. Yet their impact on telescopes in space has been overlooked.

To find out more, Alejandro Borlaff from NASA’s Ames Research Center, and colleagues simulated the view of four space-based telescopes: Hubble and the near-infrared observatory SPHEREx, which launched in 2025, as well at the European Space Agency’s proposed near-infrared ARRAKIHS mission and China’s planned Xuntian telescopes.

These observatories are, or will be placed, between 400 and 800 km from the Earth’s surface.

The authors found that if the population of mega-constellation satellites grows to the 56 000 that is projected by the end of the decade, it would contaminate about 39.6% of Hubble’s images and 96% of images from the other three telescopes.

Borlaff and colleagues predict that the average number of satellites observed per exposure would be 2.14 for Hubble, 5.64 for SPHEREx, 69 for ARRAKIHS, and 92 for Xuntian.

The authors note that one solution could be to deploy satellites at lower orbits than the telescopes operate, which would make them about four magnitudes dimmer. The downside is that emissions from these lower satellites could have implications for Earth’s ozone layer.

An ‘urgent need for dialogue’

Katherine Courtney, chair of the steering board for the Global Network on Sustainability in Space, says that without astronomy, the modern space economy “simply wouldn’t exist”.

“The space industry owes its understanding of orbital mechanics, and much of the technology development that has unlocked commercial opportunities for satellite operators, to astronomy,” she says. “The burgeoning growth of the satellite population brings many benefits to life on Earth, but the consequences for the future of astronomy must be taken into consideration.”

Courtney adds that there is now “an urgent need for greater dialogue and collaboration between astronomers and satellite operators to mitigate those impacts and find innovative ways for commercial and scientific operations to co-exist in space.”

• Katherine Courtney, chairs the Global Network on Sustainability in Space, and Alice Gorman from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, appeared on a Physics World Live panel discussion about the impact of space debris that was held on 10 November. A recording of the event is available here.

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Susumu Noda of Kyoto University has won the 2026 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics for the development of the Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Laser (PCSEL). For more than 25 years, Noda developed this new form of laser, which has potential applications in high-precision manufacturing as well as in LIDAR technologies.

Following the development of the laser in 1960, in more recent decades optical fibre lasers and semiconductor lasers have become competing technologies.

A semiconductor laser works by pumping an electrical current into a region where an n-doped (excess of electrons) and a p-doped (excess of “holes”) semiconductor material meet, causing electrons and holes to combine and release photons.

Semiconductors have several advantages in terms of their compactness, high “wallplug” efficiency, and ruggedness, but lack in other areas such as having a low brightness and functionality.

This means that conventional semiconductor lasers required external optical and mechanical elements to improve their performance, which results in large and impractical systems.

‘A great honour’

In the late 1990s, Noda began working on a new type of semiconductor laser that could challenge the performance of optical fibre lasers. These so-called PCSELs employ a photonic crystal layer  in between the semiconductor layers. Photonic crystals are nanostructured materials in which a periodic variation of the dielectric constant — formed, for example, by a lattice of holes — creates a photonic band-gap.

Noda and his research made a series of breakthrough in the technology such as demonstrating control of polarization and beam shape by tailoring the phonic crystal structure and expansion into blue–violet wavelengths.

The resulting PCSELs emit a high-quality, symmetric beam with narrow divergence and boast high brightness and high functionality while maintaining the benefits of conventional semiconductor lasers. In 2013, 0.2 W PCSELs became available and a few years later Watt-class PCSEL lasers became operational.

Noda says that it is “a great honour and a surprise” to receive the prize. “I am extremely happy to know that more than 25 years of research on photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers has been recognized in this way,” he adds. “I do hope to continue to further develop the research and its social implementation.”

Susumu Noda received his BSc and then PhD in electronics from Kyoto University in 1982 and 1991, respectively. From 1984 he also worked at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, before joining Kyoto University in 1988 where he is currently based.

Founded in 1972 by the British industrialist and philanthropist Lord J Arthur Rank, the Rank Prize is awarded biennially in nutrition and optoelectronics. The 2026 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, which has a cash award of £100 000, will be awarded formally at an event held in June.

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UK artist Alison Stott has created a new glass and light artwork – entitled Naturally Focused – that is inspired by the work of theoretical physicist Michael Berry from the University of Bristol.

Stott, who recently competed an MA in glass at Arts University Plymouth, spent over two decades previously working in visual effects for film and television, where she focussed on creating photorealistic imagery.

Her studies touched on how complex phenomena can arise from seemingly simple set-ups, for example in a rotating glass sculpture lit by LEDs.

“My practice inhabits the spaces between art and science, glass and light, craft and experience,” notes Stott. “Working with molten glass lets me embrace chaos, indeterminacy, and materiality, and my work with caustics explores the co-creation of light, matter, and perception.”

The new artwork is based on “caustics” – the curved patterns that form when light is reflected or refracted by curved surfaces or objects

The focal point of the artwork is a hand-blown glass lens that was waterjet-cut into a circle and polished so that its internal structure and optical behaviour are clearly visible. The lens is suspended within stainless steel gyroscopic rings and held by a brass support and stainless stell backplate.

The rings can be tilted or rotated to “activate shifting field of caustic projections that ripple across” the artwork. Mathematical equations are also engraved onto the brass that describe the “singularities of light” that are visible on the glass surface.

The work is inspired by Berry’s research into the relationship between classical and quantum behaviour and how subtle geometric structures govern how waves and particles behave.

Berry recently won the 2025 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, which is presented by the Institute of Physics, for his “profound contributions across mathematical and theoretical physics in a career spanning over 60 years”.

Stott says that working with Berry has pushed her understanding of caustics. “The more I learn about how these structures emerge and why they matter across physics, the more compelling they become,” notes Stott. “My aim is to let the phenomena speak for themselves, creating conditions where people can directly encounter physical behaviour and perhaps feel the same awe and wonder I do.”

The artwork will go on display at the University of Bristol following a ceremony to be held on 27 November.

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The $330m Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) has released its first results following the completion of the huge underground facility in August.

JUNO is located in Kaiping City, Guangdong Province, in the south of the country around 150 km west of Hong Kong.

Construction of the facility began in 2015 and was set to be complete some five years later. Yet the project suffered from serious flooding, which delayed construction.

JUNO, which is expected to run for more than 30 years, aims to study the relationship between the three types of neutrino: electron, muon and tau. Although JUNO will be able to detect neutrinos produced by supernovae as well as those from Earth, the observatory will mainly measure the energy spectrum of electron antineutrinos released by the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power plants, which both lie 52.5 km away.

To do this, the facility has a 80 m high and 50 m diameter experimental hall located 700 m underground. Its main feature is a 35 m radius spherical neutrino detector, containing 20,000 tonnes of liquid scintillator. When an electron antineutrino occasionally bumps into a proton in the liquid, it triggers a reaction that results in two flashes of light that are detected by the 43,000 photomultiplier tubes that observe the scintillator.

On 18 November, a paper was submitted to the arXiv preprint server concluding that the detector’s key performance indicators fully meet or surpass design expectations.

New measurement 

Neutrinos oscillate from one flavour to another as they travel near the speed of light, rarely interacting with matter. This oscillation is a result of each flavour being a combination of three neutrino mass states.

Yet scientists do not know the absolute masses of the three neutrinos but can measure neutrino oscillation parameters, known as θ₁₂, θ₂₃ and θ₁₃, as well as the square of the mass differences (Δm²) between two different types of neutrinos.

A second JUNO paper submitted on 18 November used data collected between 26 August and 2 November to measure the solar neutrino oscillation parameter θ₁₂ and Δm²₂₁ with a factor of 1.6 better precision than previous experiments.

Those earlier results, which used solar neutrinos instead of reactor antineutrinos, showed a 1.5 “sigma” discrepancy with the Standard Model of particle physics. The new JUNO measurements confirmed this difference, dubbed the solar neutrino tension, but further data will be needed to prove or disprove the finding.

“Achieving such precision within only two months of operation shows that JUNO is performing exactly as designed,” says Yifang Wang from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is JUNO project manager and spokesperson. “With this level of accuracy, JUNO will soon determine the neutrino mass ordering, test the three-flavour oscillation framework, and search for new physics beyond it.”

JUNO, which is an international collaboration of more than 700 scientists from 75 institutions across 17 countries including China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Thailand, and the US, is the second neutrino experiment in China, after the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment. It successfully measured a key neutrino oscillation parameter called θ₁₃ in 2012 before being closed down in 2020.

JUNO is also one of three next-generation neutrino experiments, the other two being the Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the US. Both are expected to become operational later this decade.

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