Physics World

"Towards quantum advantage:\nElham Kashefi, Director of the QSL and Chief Scientist of theNQCC, speaks at the third annual showcase of the lab (Credit: QSL)"Towards quantum advantage Elham Kashefi, director of the QSL and chief scientist of theNQCC, speaks at the third annual showcase of the lab. (Credit: QSL) The Quantum Software Lab (QSL) at the University of Edinburgh is going from strength to strength. Buoyed by its strategic partnership with the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre

Next Tuesday the winner(s) of the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced. To celebrate that most famous of prizes this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at a few fun aspects of past awards. I’m joined by my Physics World colleague Matin Durrani to make a few predictions for next week. We also talk about our latest Nobel infographic – which looks at the time it took for countries to claim their first Nobel laureate. Then I am joined by the Indian engineer Preetish Kakoty to talk

"Courtesy: Alison Tovey\/IOPP"Waiting game Germany was the first nation to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, with Belgium the most recent. Click the image to expand. (Courtesy: Alison Tovey/IOPP) How long did it take for your country to claim a physics Nobel laureate? Or perhaps you live in one of the 170 or so countries that has yet to produce a Nobel prize winner? The aim of our latest infographic (see figure) is to answer that question by exploring the geographical evolution of laureates. Creatin

Physicists have experimentally reconstructed the quantum probability distribution of an exciton for the first time using super-fast spectroscopy. By simultaneously capturing the spatial and momentum spreads of these short-lived quasiparticles, the work adds to our understanding of how excitons evolve in complex materials. According to members of the research team, this improved understanding could lead to advances in organic photovoltaic devices. When light shines on materials such as insulators

“The UK is really good at photonics and it should be something that the UK celebrates.” That was the verdict of John Lincoln, chief executive of the national network organization UK Photonics Leadership Group (PLG) at a recent meeting of the photonics community in Newcastle. He was speaking in a panel debate at the Photon2026 conference run by the Institute of Physics (IOP) at Newcastle University on 1–4 September. Attended by hundreds of delegates, the meeting focused on the strengths, opportun

"Courtesy: Alison Tovey\/IOPP"Courtesy: Alison Tovey/IOPP Here at Physics World we have had some luck with predicting who is going to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. One successful strategy is to identify top physicists and just keep predicting that they will win – and eventually they do! For example, we picked Anton Zeilinger for the 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2019 prizes – and he won in 2022. Clearly, it was a mistake to give up on him in 2020. In making our predictions we sometimes rely on an i

At this week’s ASTRO 2026 meeting in Boston, MA, researchers shared the results of clinical trials addressing important and longstanding questions in cancer care. In a dedicated news briefing highlighting noteworthy research studies, two speakers presented new evidence that could help inform how we deliver care to patients with brain metastases. Brain metastases – cancerous cells that spread to the brain from another site in the body – are typically removed surgically or treated with radiotherap

Picture a room where every photon bouncing off a doorbell camera, every acoustic reflection captured by a passing delivery drone, and every drop of ambient thermal noise is fed directly into a Bayesian inference engine. This is the courtroom depicted in director Timur Bekmambetov’s 2026 film Mercy, which delves deep into the murky boundary between artificial intelligence (AI) and human behaviour. Set in 2029, the film features Los Angeles police detective Chris Raven, who is also the defendant,

An important low-carbon technology is the hydrogen fuel cell, which can be used in vehicles, backup power systems and other applications. Fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity, producing only water as a by-product. A key process inside the cell is the oxygen reduction reaction, in which oxygen from the air is reduced at the cathode. This reaction is relatively slow and is one of the main factors limiting fuel-cell performance. To speed up this step, platinum catalysts are used. While high

From tracking elusive animals to protecting some of the world’s most endangered species, the latest episode of Physics World Stories explores how cutting-edge robotics, drones and ecological science are coming together on the front lines of global wildlife conservation. You’ll hear from Blair Costelloe, leader and principal investigator of the EU-funded WildDrone and WildBotics doctoral training networks, and director of research and conservation at Kenya’s Mara Elephant Project. Costelloe expla

In some materials, when many electrons interact very strongly, they behave collectively like a quantum fluid with unusual properties. One example is a Fractional Quantum Hall state, which occurs in a two-dimensional system under a strong magnetic field. In this state, the electrons form a topologically ordered quantum fluid that supports unusual collective excitations. A Fractional Chern Insulator aims to recreate the same type of physics without requiring such a strong magnetic field. Instead,

The Higgs boson is associated with the Higgs field, which gives many fundamental particles their mass. Although it was predicted in the 1960s, it was not discovered until 2012. Since then, researchers have been studying whether the Higgs behaves exactly as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics or whether it shows signs of physics beyond the Standard Model. This involves measuring how often Higgs bosons are produced, how they are produced, what they decay into, and how they interact

On 9 October 2022, a gamma-ray burst called GRB 221009A sent an enormous amount of high-energy radiation toward Earth. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) detected thousands of photons from the event, including some above 10 TeV. More than an hour later, the Carpet cosmic ray detector recorded something much harder to explain: a photon-like event with an estimated energy of 300 (+43/-38) TeV. At that energy, according to standard physics, the photon should have disappeared du

A DNA computer that calculates as it settles into thermal equilibrium has been unveiled in Ireland. Drawing together several earlier lines of research, Damien Woods and colleagues at Maynooth University created a DNA-based system that ran calculations far more quickly than they expected, and which could be easily implemented and reused with a relatively simple setup. Much like a living organism, a computer runs far from thermal equilibrium. It expends energy to maintain encoded bits of informat

The annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology is the place to be to discover the latest radiotherapy technology developments and new product launches. And this year was no exception. The ASTRO 2026 meeting, held this week in Boston, MA, saw Siemens Healthineers unveil its newest radiotherapy system – Accela – which combines precision delivery with speeds fast enough to enable stereotactic treatments in a single breath-hold. Accela achieves this by implementing a new delivery

Terrestrial solar cells rely on capturing a broad spectrum of sunlight, particularly the low-energy, long-wavelength red and infrared regions between 800 and 1150 nm. Emulating this concept underwater fails because water acts as a fierce optical filter, strongly absorbing light at wavelengths of 630 nm or more. Furthermore, descending just a few metres deeper completely attenuates longer wavelengths. This forces the aquatic environment into a twilight zone, where virtually all red light has been

Back when I used to commute to Physics World’s Bristol, UK offices every day, I heard a lot of excuses explanations for why my train was delayed. Missing crew members. Road vehicles colliding with bridges. Even, on one memorable occasion, a herd of cows blocking the tracks. One explanation I never heard, though, was the one proposed for a train that supposedly left the south-west English city of Exeter at 10.05 p.m. on 18 October 1841. According to an anonymous correspondent in Nature some 30 ye

I have been involved in tribology for most of my working life, but even today it can feel like a well-kept secret. A highly interdisciplinary field with close ties to materials science, tribology is essentially the science and technology of friction, lubrication and wear between any moving surfaces. But tribology encompasses in part one age-old challenge. I’m talking about the use of bearings, which dates back to at least 4600 BCE, when ancient Egyptians used wood log rollers to move large stone

Weather forecasting relies on many different types of data to make accurate predictions: temperature, humidity and wind data are all used to build an accurate forecast. Researchers have now found a new way to improve weather forecasts, by adding data on water isotopes in the atmosphere. For predicting weather, water vapour isotopes integrate key information on the history of their evaporation, condensation, mixing and transport. Heavy water (containing either deuterium or oxygen-18) exists in th

Cyril Hilsum, a former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, died on 23 September at the age of 101. In the 1970s Hilsum made pioneering contributions to liquid crystals paving the way for TV and computer liquid-crystal displays that are still widely used today. Hilsum was born on 17 May 1925 and completed a degree in physics at University College London in 1945. He then joined the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington before working at the Services El