After traveling hundreds of miles above Earth and spending months aboard the International Space Station, a University of Delaware experiment has returned to campus, bringing new data on how turbulence behaves in microgravity.
The project, led by assistant professor of mechanical engineering Tyler Van Buren, is designed to study how particles influence turbulent flows. From dust in the air to sand in coastal zones and bubbles at the sea surface, particles can change how flows behave.
Van Buren compares it to an energetic crowd moving around while carrying objects.
Honeycombs are famous for their elegant design, but now they may have found a new application: quantum computing. To collect knowledge from subatomic particles, quantum computers require carefully designed materials capable of performing necessary, complex functions. However, the metals used, such as ruthenium and iridium, are often rare and expensive, limiting the potential to build new technology.
In an article recently published in Physical Review Materials, researchers from SANKEN at The University of Osaka and collaborating institutions reported the creation of a special thin-film material in which cobalt atoms formed local honeycomb arrangements embedded inside a larger honeycomb matrix. These cobalt honeycomb motifs exhibit strong magnetic interactions, which are important for quantum computing applications.
Kitaev materials, a class of quantum magnetic materials studied for their potential use in quantum information science, have attracted major attention because they may host exotic quantum states known as spin liquids.
Chemical bonding is one of the central organizing principles of the microscopic world. It determines how atoms combine and thereby governs a wide range of physical and chemical properties of quantum systems across many length scales, ranging from small molecules and biomolecules to macroscopically large solid materials.
Yet, despite its fundamental importance and its prominent role already in high school science education, chemical bonds remain surprisingly elusive from the perspective of quantum mechanics. They are indispensable for describing matter, even though they are not directly observable quantities.
In a recent article published in Nature Communications, the group led by LMU physicist Christian Schilling and member of the MCQST Cluster of Excellence, addresses this long-standing challenge using concepts from quantum information theory.
Quantum mechanics is a physics framework that describes how matter and energy behave at an extremely small scale, specifically at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. An effect predicted by the laws of quantum mechanics is superposition, which entails that particles can exist in multiple states or positions simultaneously, which remain indefinite until they are measured or observed.
A well-known example of a quantum state in which a system behaves as if it is in two contrasting states at once is the so-called Schrödinger cat state. This state is rooted in a paradox introduced by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who proposed that if a cat is placed inside a sealed box with a device that has a 50% chance of killing it, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box and looks inside it.
Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology and the Quantum Science Center of Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area recently demonstrated the experimental generation of massive Schrödinger cat states using ultracold atoms—atoms cooled down to temperatures near to absolute zero.
Researchers at Quantum Source and the Weizmann Institute of Science trapped an atom close enough to interact efficiently with light confined on a chip.
Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, but today’s computers are reaching their physical and energy limits. Now, scientists are exploring a revolutionary solution: light-matter particles known as polaritons. These exotic hybrid particles combine the properties of light and matter, allowing information to move at incredible speeds while consuming far less energy than traditional electronic chips.
In this video, we explore how light-based computing could transform the future of AI, why researchers believe polariton technology may outperform conventional processors, and what this breakthrough could mean for machine learning, robotics, quantum technologies, and the future of computing itself.
Could this be the next major leap beyond silicon chips? And are we entering an era where AI operates at near light speed?
Watch to discover the science behind one of the most exciting technological breakthroughs of the decade.
In physics, quantum tunnel ling, barrier penetration, or simply tunnel ling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier that, according to classical mechanics, should not be passable due to the object not having sufficient energy to pass or surmount the barrier.
Tunnelling is a consequence of the wave nature of matter and quantum indeterminacy. The quantum wave function describes the states of a particle or other physical system and wave equations such as the Schrödinger equation describe their evolution. In a system with a short, narrow potential barrier, a small part of wavefunction can appear outside of the barrier representing a probability for tunnel ling through the barrier.
Since the probability of transmission of a wave packet through a barrier decreases exponentially with the barrier height, the barrier width, and the tunnel ling particle’s mass, tunnel ling is seen most prominently in low-mass particles such as electronstunnel ling through atomically narrow barriers. However tunnel ling has been observed with protons and even atoms and tunnel ling has been used to explain physical effects with particles this large.
Internal changes due to the sun’s “active biorhythm” have become increasingly “skin-deep” over the past four solar activity cycles, according to a new study.
Publishing its findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team led by the University of Birmingham reveals solar magnetic activity is being squeezed into an increasingly shallow layer just below the visible surface, signposting long-term changes to the sun’s active behavior.
Solar activity rises and falls in 11‑year cycles, producing solar flares, and ejections of highly charged particles and coronal mass ejections that give rise to space weather. This activity, and its cyclic variation, has its origins in the sun’s interior, in processes that regenerate and reorganize the sun’s magnetic field.
A mysterious new cosmic pattern discovered by the DAMPE space telescope may finally crack the century-old mystery of cosmic rays. Scientists studying mysterious ultra-powerful cosmic rays have uncovered a surprising hidden pattern that could finally help explain where these particles come from. Using the DAMPE space telescope, researchers found that cosmic ray particles—from tiny protons to heavy iron nuclei—all begin fading away more sharply at the exact same point, hinting at a universal rule governing their behavior across the galaxy.
For more than 100 years, scientists have been trying to understand cosmic rays, incredibly powerful particles that travel across the universe at extreme energies. Despite decades of research, many questions about where they come from and how they are accelerated remain unanswered. Now, researchers working with the DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) space telescope have uncovered an important new clue. Their findings, published in Nature, reveal a common feature shared by these mysterious particles and could help scientists better understand their origins.
Cosmic rays are the highest energy particles ever observed in nature. They carry far more energy than particles produced by even the most advanced accelerators on Earth. Scientists believe they are created by some of the universe’s most violent events, including supernova explosions, jets from black holes, and pulsars.
Protons and neutrons—the building blocks of matter—belong to a huge class of particles called hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles made of quarks that are bound together by the strong force. They are classified into two groups: baryons, which consist of three quarks (like protons and neutrons), and mesons, which are formed by a quark–antiquark pair.
Despite decades of study, many aspects of the strong force remain poorly understood, particularly the way it binds quarks together inside hadrons. Mesons made of heavy quarks—such as charm or bottom quarks—can provide an important laboratory for testing theoretical descriptions of these effects. Of particular interest to physicists are Bc+ mesons, as they contain two types of heavy quarks: a charm quark and a bottom antiquark (b̅c).
In a new result presented at the Large Hadron Collider Physics 2026 conference, physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration report the first observation of a particle with properties consistent with the Bc*+ meson, the lowest excited Bc+ meson. The paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.
