As a theoretical and mathematical physicist at Imperial College London, UK, Bhavin Khatri spent years using statistical physics to understand how organisms evolve. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and like many other scientists, he began searching for ways to apply his skills to the crisis. This led him to realize that the equations he was using to study evolution could be repurposed to model the spread of the virus – and, crucially, to understand how it could be curtailed.

In a paper published in EPL, Khatri models the spread of a SARS-CoV-2-like virus using branching process theory, which he’d previously used to study how advantageous alleles (variations in a genetic sequence) become more prevalent in a population. He then uses this model to assess the duration that interventions such as lockdowns would need to be applied in order to completely eliminate infections, with the strength of the intervention measured in terms of the number of people each infected person goes on to infect (the virus’ effective reproduction number, R).

Tantalizingly, the paper concludes that applying such interventions worldwide in June 2020 could have eliminated the COVID virus by January 2021, several months before the widespread availability of vaccines reduced its impact on healthcare systems and led governments to lift restrictions on social contact. Physics World spoke to Khatri to learn more about his research and its implications for future pandemics.

What are the most important findings in your work?

One important finding is that we can accurately calculate the distribution of times required for a virus to become extinct by making a relatively simple approximation. This approximation amounts to assuming that people have relatively little population-level “herd” immunity to the virus – exactly the situation that many countries, including the UK, faced in March 2020.

Making this approximation meant I could reduce the three coupled differential equations of the well-known SIR model (which models pandemics via the interplay between Susceptible, Infected and Recovered individuals) to a single differential equation for the number of infected individuals in the population. This single equation turned out to be the same one that physics students learn when studying radioactive decay. I then used the discrete stochastic version of exponential decay and standard approaches in branching process theory to calculate the distribution of extinction times.

Alongside the formal theory, I also used my experience in population genetic theory to develop an intuitive approach for calculating the mean of this extinction time distribution. In population genetics, when a mutation is sufficiently rare, changes in its number of copies in the population are dominated by randomness. This is true even if the mutation has a large selective advantage: it has to grow by chance to sufficient critical size – on the order of 1/(selection strength) – for selection to take hold.

The same logic works in reverse when applied to a declining number of infections. Initially, they will decline deterministically, but once they go below a threshold number of individuals, changes in infection numbers become random. Using the properties of such random walks, I calculated an expression for the threshold number and the mean duration of the stochastic phase. These agree well with the formal branching process calculation.

In practical terms, the main result of this theoretical work is to show that for sufficiently strong lockdowns (where, on average, only one of every two infected individuals goes on to infect another person, R=0.5), this distribution of extinction times was narrow enough to ensure that the COVID pandemic virus would have gone extinct in a matter of months, or at most a year.

How realistic is this counterfactual scenario of eliminating SARS-CoV-2 within a year?

Leaving politics and the likelihood of social acceptance aside for the moment, if a sufficiently strong lockdown could have been maintained for a period of roughly six months across the globe, then I am confident that the virus could have been reduced to very low levels, or even made extinct.

The question then is: is this a stable situation? From the perspective of a single nation, if the rest of the world still has infections, then that nation either needs to maintain its lockdown or be prepared to re-impose it if there are new imported cases. From a global perspective, a COVID-free world should be a stable state, unless an animal reservoir of infections causes re-infections in humans.

As for the practical success of such a strategy, that depends on politics and the willingness of individuals to remain in lockdown. Clearly, this is not in the model. One thing I do discuss, though, is that this strategy becomes far more difficult once more infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 evolve. However, the problem I was working on before this one (which I eventually published in PNAS) concerned the probability of evolutionary rescue or resistance, and that work suggests that evolution of new COVID variants reduces significantly when there are fewer infections. So an elimination strategy should also be more robust against the evolution of new variants.

What lessons would you like experts (and the public) to take from this work when considering future pandemic scenarios?

I’d like them to conclude that pandemics with similar properties are, in principle, controllable to small levels of infection – or complete extinction – on timescales of months, not years, and that controlling them minimizes the chance of new variants evolving. So, although the question of the political and social will to enact such an elimination strategy is not in the scope of the paper, I think if epidemiologists, policy experts, politicians and the public understood that lockdowns have a finite time horizon, then it is more likely that this strategy could be adopted in the future.

I should also say that my work makes no comment on the social harms of lockdowns, which shouldn’t be minimized and would need to be weighed against the potential benefits.

What do you plan to do next?

I think the most interesting next avenue will be to develop theory that lets us better understand the stability of the extinct state at the national and global level, under various assumptions about declining infections in other countries that adopted different strategies and the role of an animal reservoir.

It would also be interesting to explore the role of “superspreaders”, or infected individuals who infect many other people. There’s evidence that many infections spread primarily through relatively few superspreaders, and heuristic arguments suggest that taking this into account would decrease the time to extinction compared to the estimates in this paper.

I’ve also had a long-term interest in understanding the evolution of viruses from the lens of what are known as genotype phenotype maps, where we consider the non-trivial and often redundant mapping from genetic sequences to function, where the role of stochasticity in evolution can be described by statistical physics analogies. For the evolution of the antibodies that help us avoid virus antigens, this would be a driven system, and theories of non-equilibrium statistical physics could play a role in answering questions about the evolution of new variants.

The post Staying the course with lockdowns could end future pandemics in months appeared first on Physics World.

Whether you’re running a business project, carrying out scientific research, or doing a spot of DIY around the house, knowing when something is “good enough” can be a tough question to answer. To me, “good enough” means something that is fit for purpose. It’s about striking a balance between the effort required to achieve perfection and the cost of not moving forward. It’s an essential mindset when perfection is either not needed or – as is often the case – not attainable.

When striving for good enough, the important thing to focus on is that your outcome should meet expectations, but not massively exceed them. Sounds simple, but how often have we heard people say things like they’re “polishing coal”, striving for “gold plated” or “trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. It basically means they haven’t understood, defined or even accepted the requirements of the end goal.

Trouble is, as we go through school, college and university, we’re brought up to believe that we should strive for the best in whatever we study. Those with the highest grades, we’re told, will probably get the best opportunities and career openings. Unfortunately, this approach means we think we need to aim for perfection in everything in life, which is not always a good thing.

How to be good enough

So why is aiming for “good enough” a good thing to do? First, there’s the notion of “diminishing returns”. It takes a disproportionate amount of effort to achieve the final, small improvements that most people won’t even notice. Put simply, time can be wasted on unnecessary refinements, as embodied by the 80/20 rule (see box).

Good enough also helps us to focus efforts. When a consumer or customer doesn’t know exactly what they want, or a product development route is uncertain, it can be better to deliver things in small chunks. Providing something basic but usable can be used to solicit feedback to help clarify requirements or make improvements or additions that can be incorporated into the next chunk. This is broadly along the lines of a “minimum viable product”.

Not seeking perfection reminds us too that solutions to problems are often uncertain. If it’s not clear how, or even if, something might work, a proof of concept (PoC) can instead be a good way to try something out. Progress can be made by solving a specific technical challenge, whether via a basic experiment, demonstration or short piece of research. A PoC should help avoid committing significant time and resource to something that will never work.

Aiming for “good enough” naturally leads us to the notion of “continuous improvement”. It’s a personal favourite of mine because it allows for things to be improved incrementally as we learn or get feedback, rather than producing something in one go and then forgetting about it. It helps keep things current and relevant and encourages a culture of constantly looking for a better way to do things.

Finally, when searching for good enough, don’t forget the idea of ballpark estimates. Making approximations sounds too simple to be effective, but sometimes a rough estimate is really all you need. If an approximate guess can inform and guide your next steps or determine whether further action will be necessary then go for it. 

The benefits of good enough

Being good enough doesn’t just lead to practical outcomes, it can benefit our personal well-being too. Our time, after all, is a precious commodity and we can’t magically increase this resource. The pursuit of perfection can lead to stagnation, and ultimately burnout, whereas achieving good enough allows us to move on in a timely fashion.

A good-enough approach will even make you less stressed. By getting things done sooner and achieving more, you’ll feel freer and happier about your work even if it means accepting imperfection. Mistakes and errors are inevitable in life, so don’t be afraid to make them; use them as learning opportunities, rather than seeing them as something bad. Remember – the person who never made a mistake never got out of bed.

Recognizing that you’ve done the best you can for now is also crucial for starting new projects and making progress. By accepting good enough you can build momentum, get more things done, and consistently take actions toward achieving your goals.

Finally, good enough is also about shared ownership. By inviting someone else to look at what you’ve done, you can significantly speed up the process. In my own career I’ve often found myself agonising over some obscure detail or feeling something is missing, only to have my quandary solved almost instantly simply by getting someone else involved – making me wish I’d asked them sooner.

Caveats and conclusions

Good enough comes with some caveats. Regulatory or legislative requirements means there will always be projects that have to reach a minimum standard, which will be your top priority. The precise nature of good enough will also depend on whether you’re making stuff (be it cars or computers) or dealing with intangible commodities such as software or services.

So what’s the conclusion? Well, in the interests of my own time, I’ve decided to apply the 80/20 rule and leave it to you to draw your own conclusion. As far as I’m concerned, I think this article has been good enough, but I’m sure you’ll let me know if it hasn’t. Consider it as a minimally viable product that I can update in a future column.

The post When is good enough ‘good enough’? appeared first on Physics World.

New high-precision laser spectroscopy measurements on thorium-229 nuclei could shed more light on the fine structure constant, which determines the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, say physicists at TU Wien in Austria.

The electromagnetic interaction is one of the four known fundamental forces in nature, with the others being gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Each of these fundamental forces has an interaction constant that describes its strength in comparison with the others. The fine structure constant, α, has a value of approximately 1/137. If it had any other value, charged particles would behave differently, chemical bonding would manifest in another way and light-matter interactions as we know them would not be the same.

“As the name ‘constant’ implies, we assume that these forces are universal and have the same values at all times and everywhere in the universe,” explains study leader Thorsten Schumm from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien. “However, many modern theories, especially those concerning the nature of dark matter, predict small and slow fluctuations in these constants. Demonstrating a non-constant fine-structure constant would shatter our current understanding of nature, but to do this, we need to be able to measure changes in this constant with extreme precision.”

With thorium spectroscopy, he says, we now have a very sensitive tool to search for such variations.

Nucleus becomes slightly more elliptic

The new work builds on a project that led, last year, to the worlds’s first nuclear clock, and is based on precisely determining how the thorium-229 (²²⁹Th) nucleus changes shape when one of its neutrons transitions from a ground state to a higher-energy state. “When excited, the ²²⁹Th nucleus becomes slightly more elliptic,” Schumm explains. “Although this shape change is small (at the 2% level), it dramatically shifts the contributions of the Coulomb interactions (the repulsion between protons in the nucleus) to the nuclear quantum states.”

The result is a change in the geometry of the ²²⁹Th nucleus’ electric field, to a degree that depends very sensitively on the value of the fine structure constant. By precisely observing this thorium transition, it is therefore possible to measure whether the fine-structure constant is actually a constant or whether it varies slightly.

After making crystals of ²²⁹Th doped in a CaF₂ matrix at TU Wien, the researchers performed the next phase of the experiment in a JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado, Boulder, US, firing ultrashort laser pulses at the crystals. While they did not measure any changes in the fine structure constant, they did succeed in determining how such changes, if they exist, would translate into modifications to the energy of the first nuclear excited state of ²²⁹Th.

“It turns out that this change is huge, a factor 6000 larger than in any atomic or molecular system, thanks to the high energy governing the processes inside nuclei,” Schumm says. “This means that we are by a factor of 6000 more sensitive to fine structure variations than previous measurements.”

Increasing the spectroscopic accuracy of the ²²⁹Th transition

Researchers in the field have debated the likelihood of such an “enhancement factor” for decades, and theoretical predictions of its value have varied between zero and 10 000. “Having confirmed such a high enhancement factor will now allow us to trigger a ‘hunt’ for the observation of fine structure variations using our approach,” Schumm says.

Andrea Caputo of CERN’s theoretical physics department, who was not involved in this work, calls the experimental result “truly remarkable”, as it probes nuclear structure with a precision that has never been achieved before. However, he adds that the theoretical framework is still lacking. “In a recent work published shortly before this work, my collaborators and I showed that the nuclear-clock enhancement factor K is still subject to substantial theoretical uncertainties,” Caputo says. “Much progress is therefore still required on the theory side to model the nuclear structure reliably.”

Schumm and colleagues are now working on increasing the spectroscopic accuracy of their ²²⁹Th transition measurement by another one to two orders of magnitude. “We will then start hunting for fluctuations in the transition energy,” he reveals, “tracing it over time and – through the Earth’s movement around the Sun – space.

The present work is detailed in Nature Communications.

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A new heat engine driven by the temperature difference between Earth’s surface and outer space has been developed by Tristan Deppe and Jeremy Munday at the University of California Davis. In an outdoor trial, the duo showed how their engine could offer a reliable source of renewable energy at night.

While solar cells do a great job of converting the Sun’s energy into electricity, they have one major drawback, as Munday explains: “Lack of power generation at night means that we either need storage, which is expensive, or other forms of energy, which often come from fossil fuel sources.”

One solution is to exploit the fact that the Earth’s surface absorbs heat from the Sun during the day and then radiates some of that energy into space at night. While space has a temperature of around −270° C, the average temperature of Earth’s surface is a balmy 15° C. Together, these two heat reservoirs provide the essential ingredients of a heat engine, which is a device that extracts mechanical work as thermal energy flows from a heat source to a heat sink.

Coupling to space

“At first glance, these two entities appear too far apart to be connected through an engine. However, by radiatively coupling one side of the engine to space, we can achieve the needed temperature difference to drive the engine,” Munday explains.

For the concept to work, the engine must radiate the energy it extracts from the Earth within the atmospheric transparency window. This is a narrow band of infrared wavelengths that pass directly into outer space without being absorbed by the atmosphere.

To demonstrate this concept, Deppe and Munday created a Stirling engine, which operates through the cyclical expansion and contraction of an enclosed gas as it moves between hot and cold ends. In their setup, the ends were aligned vertically, with a pair of plates connecting each end to the corresponding heat reservoir.

For the hot end, an aluminium mount was pressed into soil, transferring the Earth’s ambient heat to the engine’s bottom plate. At the cold end, the researchers attached a black-coated plate that emitted an upward stream of infrared radiation within the transparency window.

Outdoor experiments

In a series of outdoor experiments performed throughout the year, this setup maintained a temperature difference greater than 10° C between the two plates during most months. This was enough to extract more than 400 mW per square metre of mechanical power throughout the night.

“We were able to generate enough power to run a mechanical fan, which could be used for air circulation in greenhouses or residential buildings,” Munday describes. “We also configured the device to produce both mechanical and electrical power simultaneously, which adds to the flexibility of its operation.”

With this promising early demonstration, the researchers now predict that future improvements could enable the system to extract as much as 6 W per square metre under the same conditions. If rolled out commercially, the heat engine could help reduce the reliance of solar power on night-time energy storage – potentially opening a new route to cutting carbon emissions.

The research has described in Science Advances.

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A new microscale version of the flumes that are commonly used to reproduce wave behaviour in the laboratory will make it far easier to study nonlinear hydrodynamics. The device consists of a layer of superfluid helium just a few atoms thick on a silicon chip, and its developers at the University of Queensland, Australia, say it could help us better understand phenomena ranging from oceans and hurricanes to weather and climate.

“The physics of nonlinear hydrodynamics is extremely hard to model because of instabilities that ultimately grow into turbulence,” explains study leader Warwick Bowen of Queensland’s Quantum Optics Laboratory. “It is also very hard to study in experiments since these often require hundreds-of-metre-long wave flumes.”

While such flumes are good for studying shallow-water dynamics like tsunamis and rogue waves, Bowen notes that they struggle to access many of the complex wave behaviours, such as turbulence, found in nature.

Amplifying the nonlinearities in complex behaviours

The team say that the geometrical structure of the new wave-on-a-chip device can be designed at will using lithographic techniques and built in a matter of days. Superfluid helium placed on its surface can then be controlled optomechanically. Thanks to these innovations, the researchers were able to experimentally measure nonlinear hydrodynamics millions of times faster than would be possible using traditional flumes. They could also “amplify” the nonlinearities of complex behaviours, making them orders of magnitude stronger than is possible in even the largest wave flumes.

“This promises to change the way we do nonlinear hydrodynamics, with the potential to discover new equations that better explain the complex physics behind it,” Bowen says. “Such a technique could be used widely to improve our ability to predict both natural and engineered hydrodynamic behaviours.”

So far, the team has measured several effects, including wave steepening, shock fronts and solitary wave fission thanks to the chip. While these nonlinear behaviours had been predicted in superfluids, they had never been directly observed there until now.

Waves can be generated in a very shallow depth

The Quantum Optics Laboratory researchers have been studying superfluid helium for over a decade. A key feature of this quantum liquid is that it flows without resistance, similar to the way electrons move without resistance in a superconductor. “We realized that this behaviour could be exploited in experimental studies of nonlinear hydrodynamics because it allows waves to be generated in a very shallow depth – even down to just a few atoms deep,” Bowen explains.

In conventional fluids, Bowen continues, resistance to motion becomes hugely important at small scales, and ultimately limits the nonlinear strengths accessible in traditional flume-based testing rigs. “Moving from the tens-of-centimetre depths of these flumes to tens-of-nanometres, we realized that superfluid helium could allow us to achieve many orders of magnitude stronger nonlinearities – comparable to the largest flows in the ocean – while also greatly increasing measurement speeds. It was this potential that attracted us to the project.”

The experiments were far from simple, however. To do them, the researchers needed to cryogenically cool the system to near absolute zero temperatures. They also needed to fabricate exceptionally thin superfluid helium films that interact very weakly with light, as well as optical devices with structures smaller than a micron. Combining all these components required what Bowen describes as “something of a hero experiment”, with important contributions coming from the team’s co-leader, Christopher Baker, and Walter Wasserman, who was then a PhD student in the group. The wave dynamics themselves, Bowen adds, were “exceptionally complex” and were analysed by Matthew Reeves, the first author of a Science paper describing the device.

As well as the applications areas mentioned earlier, the team say the new work, which is supported by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s APAQuS Program, could also advance our understanding of strongly-interacting quantum structures that are difficult to model theoretically. “Superfluid helium is a classic example of such a system,” explains Bowen, “and our measurements represent the most precise measurements of wave physics in these. Other applications may be found in quantum technologies, where the flow of superfluid helium could – somewhat speculatively – replace superconducting electron flow in future quantum computing architectures.”

The researchers now plan to use the device and machine learning techniques to search for new hydrodynamics equations.

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An effect first observed decades ago by Nobel laureate Arthur Ashkin has been used to fine tune the electrical charge on objects held in optical tweezers. Developed by an international team led by Scott Waitukaitis of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, the new technique could improve our understanding of aerosols and clouds.

Optical tweezers use focused laser beams to trap and manipulate small objects about 100 nm to 1 micron in size. Their precision and versatility have made them a staple across fields from quantum optics to biochemistry.

Ashkin shared the 2018 Nobel prize for inventing optical tweezers and in the 1970s he noticed that trapped objects can be electrically charged by the laser light. “However, his paper didn’t get much attention, and the observation has essentially gone ignored,” explains Waitukaitis.

Waitukaitis’ team rediscovered the effect while using optical tweezers to study how charges build up in the ice crystals accumulating inside clouds. In their experiment, micron-sized silica spheres stood in for the ice, but Ashkin’s charging effect got in their way.

Bummed out

“Our goal has always been to study charged particles in air in the context of atmospheric physics – in lightning initiation or aerosols, for example,” Waitukaitis recalls. “We never intended for the laser to charge the particle, and at first we were a bit bummed out that it did so.”

Their next thought was that they had discovered a new and potentially useful phenomenon. “Out of due diligence we of course did a deep dive into the literature to be sure that no one had seen it, and that’s when we found the old paper from Ashkin, “ says Waitukaitis.

In 1976, Ashkin described how optically trapped objects become charged through a nonlinear process whereby electrons absorb two photons simultaneously. These electrons can acquire enough energy to escape the object, leaving it with a positive charge.

Yet beyond this insight, Ashkin “wasn’t able to make much sense of the effect,” Waitukaitis explains. “I have the feeling he found it an interesting curiosity and then moved on.”

Shaking and scattering

To study the effect in more detail, the team modified their optical tweezers setup so its two copper lens holders doubled as electrodes, allowing them to apply an electric field along the axis of the confining, opposite-facing laser beams. If the silica sphere became charged, this field would cause it to shake, scattering a portion of the laser light back towards each lens.

The researchers picked off this portion of the scattered light using a beam splitter, then diverted it to a photodiode, allowing them to track the sphere’s position. Finally, they converted the measured amplitude of the shaking particle into a real-time charge measurement. This allowed them to track the relationship between the sphere’s charge and the laser’s tuneable intensity.

Their measurements confirmed Ashkin’s 1976 hypothesis that electrons on optically-trapped objects undergo two-photon absorption, allowing them to escape. Waitukaitis and colleagues improved on this model and showed how the charge on a trapped object can be controlled precisely by simply adjusting the laser’s intensity.

As for the team’s original research goal, the effect has actually been very useful for studying the behaviour of charged aerosols.

“We can get [an object] so charged that it shoots off little ‘microdischarges’ from its surface due to breakdown of the air around it, involving just a few or tens of electron charges at a time,” Waitukaitis says. “This is going to be really cool for studying electrostatic phenomena in the context of particles in the atmosphere.“

The study is described in Physical Review Letters.

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Earlier this autumn I had the pleasure of visiting the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo Canada – where I interviewed four physicists about their research. This is the second of those conversations to appear on the podcast – and it is with Bianca Dittrich, whose research focuses on quantum gravity.

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity does a great job at explaining gravity but it is thought to be incomplete because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics. This is an important shortcoming because quantum mechanics is widely considered to be one of science’s most successful theories.

Developing a theory of quantum gravity is a crucial goal in physics, but it is proving to be extremely difficult. In this episode, Dittrich explains some of the challenges and talks about ways forward – including her current research on spin foams. We also chat about the intersection of quantum gravity and condensed matter physics; and the difficulties of testing theories against observational data.

• The first interview in this series from the PI was with Javier Toledo-Marín: “Quantum computing and AI join forces for particle physics”

The post Quantum gravity: we explore spin foams and other potential solutions to this enduring challenge appeared first on Physics World.

Qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers – are plagued with a seemingly unsurmountable dilemma. If they’re fast, they aren’t robust. And if they’re robust, they aren’t fast. Both qualities are important, because all potentially useful quantum algorithms rely on being able to perform many manipulations on a qubit before its state decays. But whereas faster qubits are typically realized by strongly coupling them to the external environment, enabling them to interact more strongly with the driving field, robust qubits with long coherence times are typically achieved by isolating them from their environment.

These seemingly contradictory requirements made simultaneously fast and robust qubits an unsolved challenge – until now. In an article published in Nature Communications, a team of physicists led by Dominik Zumbühl from the University of Basel, Switzerland show that it is, in fact, possible to increase both the coherence time and operational speed of a qubit, demonstrating a pathway out of this long-standing impasse.

The magic ingredient

The key ingredient driving this discovery is something called the direct Rashba spin-orbit interaction. The best-known example of spin-orbit interaction comes from atomic physics. Consider a hydrogen atom, in which a single electron revolves around a single proton in the nucleus. During this orbital motion, the electron interacts with the static electric field generated by the positively charged nucleus. The electron in turn experiences an effective magnetic field that couples to the electron’s intrinsic magnetic moment, or spin. This coupling of the electron’s orbital motion to its spin is called spin-orbit (SO) interaction.

Aided by collaborators at the University of Oxford, UK and TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Zumbühl and colleagues chose to replace this simple SO interaction with a far more complex landscape of electrostatic potential generated by a 10-nanometer-thick germanium wire coated with a thin silicon shell. By removing a single electron from this wire, they create states known as holes that can be used as qubits, with quantum information being encoded in the hole’s spin.

Importantly, the underlying crystal structure of the silicon-coated germanium wire constrains these holes to discrete energy levels called bands. “If you were to mathematically model a low-level hole residing in one of these bands using perturbation theory – a commonly applied method in which more remote bands are treated as corrections to the ground state – you would find a term that looks structurally similar to the spin–orbit interaction known from atomic physics,” explains Miguel Carballido, who conducted the work during his PhD at Basel, and is now a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales’ School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications in Sydney, Australia.

By encoding the quantum states in these energy levels, the spin-orbit interaction can be used to drive the hole-qubit between its two spin states. What makes this interaction special is that it can be tuned using an external electric field. Thus, by applying a stronger electric field, the interaction can be strengthened – resulting in faster qubit manipulation.

Reaching a plateau

This ability to make a qubit faster by tuning an external parameter isn’t new. The difference is that whereas in other approaches, a stronger interaction also means higher sensitivity to fluctuations in the driving field, the Basel researchers found a way around this problem. As they increase the electric field, the spin-orbit interaction increases up to a certain point. Beyond this point, any further increase in the electric field will cause the hole to remain stuck within a low energy band. This restricts the hole’s ability to interact with other bands to change its spin, causing the SO interaction strength to drop.

By tuning the electric field to this peak, they can therefore operate in a “plateau” region where the SO interaction is the strongest, but the sensitivity to noise is the lowest. This leads to high coherence times (see figure), meaning that the qubit remains in the desired quantum state for longer. By reaching this plateau, where the qubit is both fast and robust, the researchers demonstrate the ability to operate their device in the “compromise-free” regime.

So, is quantum computing now a solved problem? The researchers’ answer is “not yet”, as there are still many challenges to overcome. “A lot of the heavy lifting is being done by the quasi 1D system provided by the nanowire,” remarks Carballido, “but this also limits scalability.” He also notes that the success of the experiment depends on being able to fabricate each qubit device very precisely, and doing this reproducibly remains a challenge.

The post Can fast qubits also be robust? appeared first on Physics World.

In the early universe, moments after the Big Bang and cosmic inflation, clusters of exotic, massive particles could have collapsed to form bizarre objects called cannibal stars and boson stars. In turn, these could have then collapsed to form primordial black holes – all before the first elements were able to form.

This curious chain of events is predicted by a new model proposed by a trio of scientists at SISSA, the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.

Their proposal involves a hypothetical moment in the early universe called the early matter-dominated (EMD) epoch. This would have lasted only a few seconds after the Big Bang, but could have been dominated by exotic particles, such as the massive, supersymmetric particles predicted by string theory.

“There are no observations that hint at the existence of an EMD epoch – yet!” says SISSA’s Pranjal Ralegankar. “But many cosmologists are hoping that an EMD phase occurred because it is quite natural in many models.”

Some models of the early universe predict the formation of primordial black holes from quantum fluctuations in the inflationary field. Now, Ralegankar and his colleagues, Daniele Perri and Takeshi Kobayashi propose a new and more natural pathway for forming primordial holes via an EMD epoch.

They postulate that in the first second of existence when the universe was small and incredibly hot, exotic massive particles emerged and clustered in dense haloes. The SISSA physicists propose that the haloes then collapsed into hypothetical objects called cannibal stars and boson stars.

Cannibal stars are powered by particles annihilating each other, which would have allowed the objects to resist further gravitational collapse for a few seconds. However, they would not have produced light like normal stars.

“The particles in a cannibal star can only talk to each other, which is why they are forced to annihilate each other to counter the immense pressure from gravity,” Ralegankar tells Physics World. “They are immensely hot, simply because the particles that we consider are so massive. The temperature of our cannibal stars can range from a few GeV to on the order of 10¹⁰ GeV. For comparison, the Sun is on the order of keV.”

Boson stars, meanwhile, would be made from pure a Bose–Einstein condensate, which is a state of matter whereby the individual particles quantum mechanically act as one.

Both the cannibal stars and boson stars would exist within larger haloes that would quickly collapse to form primordial black holes with masses about the same as asteroids (about 10¹⁴–10¹⁹ kg). All of this could have taken place just 10 s after the Big Bang.

Dark matter possibility

Ralegankar, Perri and Kobayashi point out that the total mass of primordial black holes that their model produces matches the amount of dark matter in the universe.

“Current observations rule out black holes to be dark matter, except in the asteroid-mass range,” says Ralegankar. “We showed that our models can produce black holes in that mass range.”

Richard Massey, who is a dark-matter researcher at Durham University in the UK, agrees that microlensing observations by projects such as the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) have ruled out a population of black holes with planetary masses, but not asteroid masses. However, Massey is doubtful that these black holes could make up dark matter.

“It would be pretty contrived for them to make up a large fraction of what we call dark matter,” he says. “It’s possible that dark matter could be these primordial black holes, but they’d need to have been created with the same mass no matter where they were and whatever environment they were in, and that mass would have to be tuned to evade current experimental evidence.”

In the coming years, upgrades to OGLE and the launch of NASA’s Roman Space Telescope should finally provide sensitivity to microlensing events produced by objects in the asteroid mass range, allowing researchers to settle the matter.

It is also possible that cannibal and boson stars exist today, produced by collapsing haloes of dark matter. But unlike those proposed for the early universe, modern cannibal and boson stars would be stable and long-lasting.

“Much work has already been done for boson stars from dark matter, and we are simply suggesting that future studies should also think about the possibility of cannibal stars from dark matter,” explains Ralegankar. “Gravitational lensing would be one way to search for them, and depending on models, maybe also gamma rays from dark-matter annihilation.”

The research is described in Physical Review D.

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The deliberate targeting of scientists in recent years has become one of the most disturbing, and overlooked, developments in modern conflict. In particular, Iranian physicists and engineers have been singled out for almost two decades, with sometimes fatal consequences. In 2007 Ardeshir Hosseinpour, a nuclear physicist at Shiraz University, died in mysterious circumstances that were widely attributed to poisoning or radioactive exposure.

Over the following years, at least five more Iranian researchers have been killed. They include particle physicist Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, who was Iran’s representative at the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East project. Known as SESAME, it is the only scientific project in the Middle East where Iran and Israel collaborate.

Others to have died include nuclear engineer Majid Shahriari, another Iranian representative at SESAME, and nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who were both killed by bombing or gunfire in Tehran. These attacks were never formally acknowledged, nor were they condemned by international scientific institutions. The message, however, was implicit: scientists in politically sensitive fields could be treated as strategic targets, even far from battlefields.

What began as covert killings of individual researchers has now escalated, dangerously, into open military strikes on academic communities. Israeli airstrikes on residential areas in Tehran and Isfahan during the 12-day conflict between the two countries in June led to at least 14 Iranian scientists and engineers and members of their family being killed. The scientists worked in areas such as materials science, aerospace engineering and laser physics. I believe this shift, from covert assassinations to mass casualties, crossed a line. It treats scientists as enemy combatants simply because of their expertise.

The assassinations of scientists are not just isolated tragedies; they are a direct assault on the global commons of knowledge, corroding both international law and international science. Unless the world responds, I believe the precedent being set will endanger scientists everywhere and undermine the principle that knowledge belongs to humanity, not the battlefield.

Drawing a red line

International humanitarian law is clear: civilians, including academics, must be protected. Targeting scientists based solely on their professional expertise undermines the Geneva Convention and erodes the civilian–military distinction at the heart of international law.

Iran, whatever its politics, remains a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its scientists are entitled under international law to conduct peaceful research in medicine, energy and industry. Their work is no more inherently criminal than research that other countries carry out in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technology or genetics.

If we normalize the preemptive assassination of scientists, what stops global rivals from targeting, say, AI researchers in Silicon Valley, quantum physicists in Beijing or geneticists in Berlin? Once knowledge itself becomes a liability, no researcher is safe. Equally troubling is the silence of the international scientific community with organizations such as the UN, UNESCO and the European Research Council as well as leading national academies having not condemned these killings, past or present.

Silence is not neutral. It legitimizes the treatment of scientists as military assets. It discourages international collaboration in sensitive but essential research and it creates fear among younger researchers, who may abandon high-impact fields to avoid risk. Science is built on openness and exchange, and when researchers are murdered for their expertise, the very idea of science as a shared human enterprise is undermined.

The assassinations are not solely Iran’s loss. The scientists killed were part of a global community; collaborators and colleagues in the pursuit of knowledge. Their deaths should alarm every nation and every institution that depends on research to confront global challenges, from climate change to pandemics.

I believe that international scientific organizations should act. At a minimum, they should publicly condemn the assassination of scientists and their families; support independent investigations under international law; as well as advocate for explicit protections for scientists and academic facilities in conflict zones.

Importantly, voices within Israel’s own scientific community can play a critical role too. Israeli academics, deeply committed to collaboration and academic freedom, understand the costs of blurring the boundary between science and war. Solidarity cannot be selective.

Recent events are a test case for the future of global science. If the international community tolerates the targeting of scientists, it sets a dangerous precedent that others will follow. What appears today as a regional assault on scientists from the Global South could tomorrow endanger researchers in China, Europe, Russia or the US.

Science without borders can only exist if scientists are recognized and protected as civilians without borders. That principle is now under direct threat and the world must draw a red line – killing scientists for their expertise is unacceptable. To ignore these attacks is to invite a future in which knowledge itself becomes a weapon, and the people who create it expendable. That is a world no-one should accept.

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DNA is a fascinating macromolecule that guides protein production and enables cell replication. It has also found applications in nanoscience and materials design.

Colloidal crystals are ordered structures made from tiny particles suspended in fluid that can bond to other particles and add functionalisation to materials. By controlling colloidal particles, we can build advanced nanomaterials using a bottom-up approach. There are several ways to control colloidal particle design, ranging from experimental conditions such as pH and temperature to external controls like light and magnetic fields.

An exciting approach is to use DNA-mediated processes. DNA binds to colloidal surfaces and regulates how the colloids organize, providing molecular-level control. These connections are reversible and can be broken using standard experimental conditions (e.g., temperature), allowing for dynamic and adaptable systems. One important motivation is their good biocompatibility, which has enabled applications in biomedicine such as drug delivery, biosensing, and immunotherapy.

Programmable Atom Equivalents (PAEs) are large colloidal particles whose surfaces are functionalized with single-stranded DNA, while separate, much smaller DNA-coated linkers, called Electron Equivalents (EEs), roam in solution and mediate bonds between PAEs. In typical PAE-EE systems, the EEs carry multiple identical DNA ends that can all bind the same type of PAE, which limits the complexity of the assemblies and makes it harder to program highly specific connections between different PAE types.

In this study, the researchers investigate how EEs with arbitrary valency, carrying many DNA arms, regulate interactions in a binary mixture of two types of PAEs. Each EE has multiple single-stranded DNA ends of two different types, each complementary to the DNA on one of the PAE species. The team develops a statistical mechanical model to predict how EEs distribute between the PAEs and to calculate the effective interaction, a measure of how strongly the PAEs attract each other, which in turn controls the structures that can form.

Using this model, they inform Monte Carlo simulations to predict system behaviour under different conditions. The model shows quantitative agreement with simulation results and reveals an anomalous dependence of PAE-PAE interactions on EE valency, with interactions converging at high valency. Importantly, the researchers identify an optimal valency that maximizes selectivity between targeted and non-targeted binding pairs. This groundbreaking research provides design principles for programmable self-assembly and offers a framework that can be integrated into DNA nanoscience.

Do you want to learn more about this topic?

Assembly of colloidal particles in solution by Kun Zhao and Thomas G Mason (2018)

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Proteins are made up of a sequence of building blocks called amino acids. Understanding these sequences is crucial for studying how proteins work, how they interact with other molecules, and how changes (mutations) can lead to diseases.

These mutations happen over vastly different time periods and are not completely random but strongly correlated, both in space (distinct sites along the sequences) and in time (subsequent mutations of the same site).

It turns out that these correlations are very reminiscent of disordered physical systems, notably glasses, emulsions, and foams.

A team of researchers from Italy and France have now used this similarity to build a new statistical model to simulate protein evolution.  They went on to study the role of different factors causing these mutations.

They found that the initial (ancestral) protein sequence has a significant influence on the evolution process, especially in the short term. This means that information from the ancestral sequence can be traced back over a certain period and is not completely lost.

The strength of interactions between different amino acids within the protein affects how long this information persists.

Although ultimately the team did find differences between the evolution of physical systems and that of protein sequences, this kind of insight would not have been possible without using the language of statistical physics, i.e. space-time correlations.

The researchers expect that their results will soon be tested in the lab thanks to upcoming advances in experimental techniques.

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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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WiFi networks could pose significant privacy risks even to people who aren’t carrying or using WiFi-enabled devices, say researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. According to their analysis, the current version of the technology passively records information that is detailed enough to identify individuals moving through networks, prompting them to call for protective measures in the next iteration of WiFi standards.

Although wireless networks are ubiquitous and highly useful, they come with certain privacy and security risks. One such risk stems from a phenomenon known as WiFi sensing, which the researchers at KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL) define as “the inference of information about the networks’ environment from its signal propagation characteristics”.

“As signals propagate through matter, they interfere with it – they are either transmitted, reflected, absorbed, polarized, diffracted, scattered, or refracted,” they write in their study, which is published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’25). “By comparing an expected signal with a received signal, the interference can be estimated and used for error correction of the received data.”

 An under-appreciated consequence, they continue, is that this estimation contains information about any humans who may have unwittingly been in the signal’s path. By carefully analysing the signal’s interference with the environment, they say, “certain aspects of the environment can be inferred” – including whether humans are present, what they are doing and even who they are.

“Identity inference attack” is a threat

The KASTEL team terms this an “identity inference attack” and describes it as a threat that is as widespread as it is serious. “This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” says Julian Todt, who co-led the study with his KIT colleague Thorsten Strufe. “For example, if you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later – for example by public authorities or companies.”

While Todt acknowledges that security services, cybercriminals and others do have much simpler ways of tracking individuals – for example by accessing data from CCTV cameras or video doorbells – he argues that the ubiquity of wireless networks lends itself to being co-opted as a near-permanent surveillance infrastructure. There is, he adds, “one concerning property” about wireless networks: “They are invisible and raise no suspicion.”

Identity of individuals could be extracted using a machine-learning model

Although the possibility of using WiFi networks in this way is not new, most previous WiFi-based security attacks worked by analysing so-called channel state information (CSI). These data indicate how a radio signal changes when it reflects off walls, furniture, people or animals. However, the KASTEL researchers note that the latest WiFi standard, known as WiFi 5 (802.11ac), changes the picture by enabling a new and potentially easier form of attack based on beamforming feedback information (BFI).

While beamforming uses similar information as CSI, Todt explains that it does so on the sender’s side instead of the receiver’s. This means that a BFI-based surveillance method would require nothing more than standard devices connected to the WiFi network. “The BFI could be used to create images from different perspectives that might then serve to identify persons that find themselves in the WiFi signal range,” Todt says. “The identity of individuals passing through these radio waves could then be extracted using a machine-learning model. Once trained, this model would make an identification in just a few seconds.”

In their experiments, Todt and colleagues studied 197 participants as they walked through a WiFi field while being simultaneously recorded with CSI and BFI from four different angles. The participants had five different “walking styles” (such as walking normally and while carrying a backpack) as well as different gaits. The researchers found that they could identify individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, regardless of the recording angle or the individual’s walking style or gait.

“Risks to our fundamental rights”

“The technology is powerful, but at the same time entails risks to our fundamental rights, especially to privacy,” says Strufe. He warns that authoritarian states could use the technology to track demonstrators and members of opposition groups, prompting him and his colleagues to “urgently call” for protective measures and privacy safeguards to be included in the forthcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard.

“The literature on all novel sensing solutions highlights their utility for various novel applications,” says Todt, “but the privacy risks that are inherent to such sensing are often overlooked, or worse — these sensors are claimed to be privacy-friendly without any rationale for these claims. As such, we feel it necessary to point out the privacy risks that novel solutions such as WiFi sensing bring with them.”

The researchers say they would like to see approaches developed that can mitigate the risk of identity inference attack. However, they are aware that this will be difficult, since this type of attack exploits the physical properties of the actual WiFi signal. “Ideally, we would influence the WiFi standard to contain privacy-protections in future versions,” says Todt, “but even the impact of this would be limited as there are already millions of WiFi devices out there that are vulnerable to such an attack.”

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How do standards support the translation of quantum science into at-scale commercial opportunities?

The standardization process helps to promote the legitimacy of emerging quantum technologies by distilling technical inputs and requirements from all relevant stakeholders across industry, research and government. Put simply: if you understand a technology well enough to standardize elements of it, that’s when you know it’s moved beyond hype and theory into something of practical use for the economy and society.

What are the upsides of standardization for developers of quantum technologies and, ultimately, for end-users in industry and the public sector?

Standards will, over time, help the quantum technology industry achieve critical mass on the supply side, with those economies of scale driving down prices and increasing demand. As the nascent quantum supply chain evolves – linking component manufacturers, subsystem developers and full-stack quantum computing companies – standards will also ensure interoperability between products from different vendors and different regions.

Those benefits flow downstream as well because standards, when implemented properly, increase trust among end-users by defining a minimum quality of products, processes and services. Equally important, as new innovations are rolled out into the marketplace by manufacturers, standards will ensure compatibility across current and next-generation quantum systems, reducing the likelihood of lock-ins to legacy technologies.

What’s your role in coordinating NPL’s standards effort in quantum science and technology?

I have strategic oversight of our core technical programmes in quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum metrology and quantum-enabled PNT (position, navigation and timing). It’s a broad-scope remit that spans research, training as well as responsibility for standardization and international collaboration, with the latter often going hand-in-hand.

Right now, we have over 150 people working within the NPL quantum metrology programme. Their collective focus is on developing the measurement science necessary to build, test and evaluate a wide range of quantum devices and systems. Our research helps innovators, whether in an industry or university setting, to push the limits of quantum technology by providing leading-edge capabilities and benchmarking to measure the performance of new quantum products and services.

It sounds like there are multiple layers of activity.

That’s right. For starters, we have a team focusing on the inter-country strategic relationships, collaborating closely with colleagues at other National Metrology Institutes (like NIST in the US and PTB in Germany). A key role in this regard is our standards specialist who, given his background working in the standards development organizations (SDOs), acts as a “connector” between NPL’s quantum metrology teams and, more widely, the UK’s National Quantum Technology Programme and the international SDOs.

We also have a team of technical experts who sit on specialist working groups within the SDOs. Their inputs to standards development are not about NPL’s interests, rather providing expertise and experience gained from cutting-edge metrology; also building a consolidated set of requirements gathered from stakeholders across the quantum community to further the UK’s strategic and technical priorities in quantum.

So NPL’s quantum metrology programme provides a focal point for quantum standardization?

Absolutely. We believe that quantum metrology and standardization are key enablers of quantum innovation, fast-tracking the adoption and commercialization of quantum technologies while building confidence among investors and across the quantum supply chain and early-stage user base. For NPL and its peers, the task right now is to agree on the terminology and best practice as we figure out the performance metrics, benchmarks and standards that will enable quantum to go mainstream.

How does NPL engage the UK quantum community on standards development?

Front-and-centre is the UK Quantum Standards Network Pilot. This initiative – which is being led by NPL – brings together representatives from industry, academia and government to work on all aspects of standards development: commenting on proposals and draft standards; discussing UK standards policy and strategy; and representing the UK in the European and international SDOs. The end-game? To establish the UK as a leading voice in quantum standardization, both strategically and technically, and to ensure that UK quantum technology companies have access to global supply chains and markets.

What about NPL outreach to prospective end-users of quantum technologies?

The Quantum Standards Network Pilot also provides a direct line to prospective end-users of quantum technologies in business sectors like finance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and energy. What’s notable is that the end-users are often preoccupied with questions that link in one way or another to standardization. For example: how well do quantum technologies stack up against current solutions? Are quantum systems reliable enough yet? What does quantum cost to implement and maintain, including long-term operational costs? Are there other emerging technologies that could do the same job? Is there a solid, trustworthy supply chain?

It’s clear that international collaboration is mandatory for successful standards development. What are the drivers behind the recently announced NMI-Q collaboration?

The quantum landscape is changing fast, with huge scope for disruptive innovation in quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum sensing. Faced with this level of complexity, NMI-Q leverages the combined expertise of the world’s leading National Metrology Institutes – from the G7 countries and Australia – to accelerate the development and adoption of quantum technologies.

No one country can do it all when it comes to performance metrics, benchmarks and standards in quantum science and technology. As such, NMI-Q’s priorities are to conduct collaborative pre-standardization research; develop a set of “best measurement practices” needed by industry to fast-track quantum innovation; and, ultimately, shape the global standardization effort in quantum. NPL’s prominent role within NMI-Q (I am the co-chair along with Barbara Goldstein of NIST) underscores our commitment to evidence-based decision-making in standards development and, ultimately, to the creation of a thriving quantum ecosystem.

What are the attractions of NPL’s quantum programme for early-career physicists?

Every day, our measurement scientists address cutting-edge problems in quantum – as challenging as anything they’ll have encountered previously in an academic setting. What’s especially motivating, however, is that the NPL is a mission-driven endeavour with measurement outcomes linking directly to wider societal and economic benefits – not just in the UK, but internationally as well.

Further reading

Performance metrics and benchmarks point the way to practical quantum advantage

End note: NPL retains copyright on this article.

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In proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) systems, voltage cycles dropping below a threshold are associated with reversible performance improvements, which remain poorly understood despite being documented in literature. The distinction between reversible and irreversible performance changes is crucial for accurate degradation assessments. One approach in literature to explain this behaviour is the oxidation and reduction of iridium. Iridium-based electrocatalyst activity and stability in PEMWE hinge on their oxidation state, influenced by the applied voltage. Yet, full-cell PEMWE dynamic performance remains under-explored, with a focus typically on stability rather than activity. This study systematically investigates reversible performance behaviour in PEMWE cells using Ir-black as an anodic catalyst. Results reveal a recovery effect when the low voltage level drops below 1.5 V, with further enhancements observed as the voltage decreases, even with a short holding time of 0.1 s. This reversible recovery is primarily driven by improved anode reaction kinetics, likely due to changing iridium oxidation states, and is supported by alignment between the experimental data and a dynamic model that links iridium oxidation/reduction processes to performance metrics. This model allows distinguishing between reversible and irreversible effects and enables the derivation of optimized operation schemes utilizing the recovery effect.

Tobias Krenz is a simulation and modelling engineer at Siemens Energy in the Transformation of Industry business area focusing on reducing energy consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions in industrial processes. He completed his PhD from Liebniz University Hannover in February 2025. He earned a degree from Berlin University of Applied Sciences in 2017 and a MSc from Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2020.

Alexander Rex is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Electric Power Systems at Leibniz University Hannover. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Technische Universität Braunschweig, an MEng from Tongji University, and an MSc from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He was a visiting scholar at Berkeley Lab from 2024 to 2025.

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Ramy Shelbaya has been hooked on physics ever since he was a 12-year-old living in Egypt and read about the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experiment in the UK. Biology and chemistry were interesting to him but never quite as “satisfying”, especially as they often seemed to boil down to physics in the end. “So I thought, maybe that’s where I need to go,” Shelbaya recalls.

His instincts seem to have led him in the right direction. Shelbaya is now chief executive of Quantum Dice, an Oxford-based start-up he co-founded in 2020 to develop quantum hardware for exploiting the inherent randomness in quantum mechanics. It closed its first funding round in 2021 with a seven-figure investment from a consortium of European investors, while also securing grant funding on the same scale.

Now providing cybersecurity hardware systems for clients such as BT, Quantum Dice is launching a piece of hardware for probabilistic computing, based on the same core innovation. Full of joy and zeal for his work, Shelbaya admits that his original decision to pursue physics was “scary”. Back then, he didn’t know anyone who had studied the subject and was not sure where it might lead.

The journey to a start-up

Fortunately, Shelbaya’s parents were onboard from the start and their encouragement proved “incredibly helpful”. His teachers also supported him to explore physics in his extracurricular reading, instilling a confidence in the subject that eventually led Shelbaya to do undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics at École normale supérieure PSL in France.

He then moved to the UK to do a PhD in atomic and laser physics at the University of Oxford. Just as he was wrapping up his PhD, Oxford University Innovation (OUI) – which manages its technology transfer and consulting activities – launched a new initiative that proved pivotal to Shelbaya’s career.

OUI had noted that the university generated a lot of IP and research results that could be commercialized but that the academics producing it often favoured academic work over progressing the technology transfer themselves. On the other hand, lots of students were interested in entering the world of business.

To encourage those who might be business-minded to found their own firms, while also fostering more spin-outs from the university’s patents and research, OUI launched the Student Entrepreneurs’ Programme (StEP). A kind of talent show to match budding entrepreneurs with technology ready for development, StEP invited participants to team up, choose commercially promising research from the university, and pitch for support and mentoring to set up a company.

As part of Oxford’s atomic and laser physics department, Shelbaya was aware that it had been developing a quantum random number generator. So when the competition was launched, he collaborated with other competition participants to pitch the device. “My team won, and this is how Quantum Dice was born.”

Random value

The initial technology was geared towards quantum random number generation, for particular use in cybersecurity. Random numbers are at the heart of all encryption algorithms, but generating truly random numbers has been a stumbling block, with the “pseudorandom” numbers people make do with being prone to prediction and hence security violation.

Quantum mechanics provides a potential solution because there is inherent randomness in the values of certain quantum properties. Although for a long time this randomness was “a bane to quantum physicists”, as Shelbaya puts it, Quantum Dice and other companies producing quantum random number generators are now harnessing it for useful technologies.

Where Quantum Dice sees itself as having an edge over its competitors is in its real-time quality assurance of the true quantum randomness of the device’s output. This means it should be able to spot any corruption to the output due to environmental noise or someone tampering with the device, which is an issue with current technologies.

Quantum Dice already offers Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) products in a range of form factors that integrate directly within servers, PCs and hardware security systems. Clients can also access the company’s cloud-based solution –  Quantum Entropy-as-a-Service – which, powered by its QRNG hardware, integrates into the Internet of Things and cloud infrastructure.

Recently Quantum Dice has also launched a probabilistic computing processor based on its QRNG for use in algorithms centred on probabilities. These are often geared towards optimization problems that apply in a number of sectors, including supply chains and logistics, finance, telecommunications and energy, as well as simulating quantum systems, and Boltzmann machines – a type of energy-based machine learning model for which Shelbaya says researchers “have long sought efficient hardware”.

Stress testing

After winning the start-up competition in 2019 things got trickier when Quantum Dice was ready to be incorporated, which occurred just at the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown. Shelbaya moved the prototype device into his living room because it was the only place they could ensure access to it, but it turned out the real challenges lay elsewhere.

“One of the first things we needed was investments, and really, at that stage of the company, what investors are investing in is you,” explains Shelbaya, highlighting how difficult this is when you cannot meet in person. On the plus side, since all his meetings were remote, he could speak to investors in Asia in the morning, Europe in the afternoon and the US in the evening, all within the same day.

Another challenge was how to present the technology simply enough so that people would understand and trust it, while not making it seem so simple that anyone could be doing it. “There’s that sweet spot in the middle,” says Shelbaya. “That is something that took time, because it’s a muscle that I had never worked.”

Due rewards

The company performed well for its size and sector in terms of securing investments when their first round of funding closed in 2021. Shelbaya is shy of attributing the success to his or even the team’s abilities alone, suggesting this would “underplay a lot of other factors”. These include the rising interest in quantum technologies, and the advantages of securing government grant funding programmes at the same time, which he feels serves as “an additional layer of certification”.

For Shelbaya every day is different and so are the challenges. Quantum Dice is a small new company, where many of the 17 staff are still fresh from university, so nurturing trust among clients, particularly in the high-stakes world of cybersecurity is no small feat. Managing a group of ambitious, energetic and driven young people can be complicated too.

But there are many rewards, ranging from seeing a piece of hardware finally work as intended and closing a deal with a client, to simply seeing a team “you have been working to develop, working together without you”.

For others hoping to follow a similar career path, Shelbaya’s advice is to do what you enjoy – not just because you will have fun but because you will be good at it too. “Do what you enjoy,” he says, “because you will likely be great at it.”

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Researchers in the US and Korea have created nanoparticles with carefully designed “patches” on their surfaces using a new atomic stencilling technique. These patches can be controlled with incredible precision, and could find use in targeted drug delivery, catalysis, microelectronics and tissue engineering.

The first step in the stencilling process is to create a mask on the surface of gold nanoparticles. This mask prevents a “paint” made from grafted-on polymers from attaching to certain areas of the nanoparticles.

“We then use iodide ions as a stencil,” explains Qian Chen, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, who led the new research effort. “These adsorb (stick) to the surface of the nanoparticles in specific patterns that depend on the shape and atomic arrangement of the nanoparticles’ facets. That’s how we create the patches – the areas where the polymers selectively bind.” Chen adds that she and her collaborators can then tailor the surface chemistry of these tiny patchy nanoparticles in a very controlled way.

A gap in the field of microfabrication stencilling

The team decided to develop the technique after realizing there was a gap in the field of microfabrication stencilling. While techniques in this area have advanced considerably in recent years, allowing ever-smaller microdevices to be incorporated into ever-faster computer chips, most of them rely on top-down approaches for precisely controlling nanoparticles. By comparison, Chen says, bottom-up methods have been largely unexplored even though they are low-cost, solution-processable, scalable and compatible with complex, curved and three-dimensional surfaces.

Reporting their work in Nature, the researchers say they were inspired by the way proteins naturally self-assemble. “One of the holy grails in the field of nanomaterials is making complex, functional structures from nanoscale building blocks,” explains Chen. “It’s extremely difficult to control the direction and organization of each nanoparticle. Proteins have different surface domains, and thanks to their interactions with each other, they can make all the intricate machines we see in biology. We therefore adopted that strategy by creating patches or distinct domains on the surface of the nanoparticles.”

“Elegant and impressive”

Philip Moriarty, a physicist of the University of Nottingham, UK who was not involved in the project, describes it as “elegant and impressive” work. “Chen and colleagues have essentially introduced an entirely new mode of self-assembly that allows for much greater control of nanoparticle interactions,” he says, “and the ‘atomic stencil’ concept is clever and versatile.”

The team, which includes researchers at the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, Cornell, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Korea’s Chonnam National University as well as Urbana-Champaign, agrees that the potential applications are vast. “Since we can now precisely control the surface properties of these nanoparticles, we can design them to interact with their environment in specific ways,” explains Chen. “That opens the door for more effective drug delivery, where nanoparticles can target specific cells. It could also lead to new types of catalysts, more efficient microelectronic components and even advanced materials with unique optical and mechanical properties.”

She and her colleagues say they now want to extend their approach to different types of nanoparticles and different substrates to find out how versatile it truly is. They will also be developing computational models that can predict the outcome of the stencilling process – something that would allow them to design and synthesize patchy nanoparticles for specific applications on demand.

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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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New experiments at CERN by an international team have ruled out a potential source of intergalactic magnetic fields. The existence of such fields is invoked to explain why we do not observe secondary gamma rays originating from blazars.

Led by Charles Arrowsmith at the UK’s University of Oxford, the team suggests the absence of gamma rays could be the result of an unexplained phenomenon that took place in the early universe.

A blazar is an extraordinarily bright object with a supermassive black hole at its core. Some of the matter falling into the black hole is accelerated outwards in a pair of opposing jets, creating intense beams of radiation. If a blazar jet points towards Earth, we observe a bright source of light including high-energy teraelectronvolt gamma rays.

During their journey across intergalactic space, these gamma-ray photons will occasionally collide with the background starlight that permeates the universe. These collisions can create cascades of electrons and positrons that can then scatter off photons to create gamma rays in the gigaelectronvolt energy range. These gamma-rays should travel in the direction of the original jet, but this secondary radiation has never been detected.

Deflecting field

Magnetic fields could be the reason for this dearth, as Arrowsmith explains: “The electrons and positrons in the pair cascade would be deflected by an intergalactic magnetic field, so if this is strong enough, we could expect these pairs to be steered away from the line of sight to the blazar, along with the reprocessed gigaelectronvolt gamma rays.” It is not clear, however, that such fields exist – and if they do, what could have created them.

Another explanation for the missing gamma rays involves the extremely sparse plasma that permeates intergalactic space. The beam of electron–positron pairs could interact with this plasma, generating magnetic fields that separate the pairs. Over millions of years of travel, this process could lead to beam–plasma instabilities that reduce the beam’s ability to create gigaelectronvolt gamma rays that are focused on Earth.

Oxford’s Gianluca Gregori  explains, “We created an experimental platform at the HiRadMat facility at CERN to create electron–positron pairs and transport them through a metre-long ambient argon plasma, mimicking the interaction of pair cascades from blazars with the intergalactic medium”. Once the pairs had passed through the plasma, the team measured the degree to which they had been separated.

Tightly focused

Called Fireball, the experiment found that the beams remained far more tightly focused than expected. “When these laboratory results are scaled up to the astrophysical system, they confirm that beam–plasma instabilities are not strong enough to explain the absence of the gigaelectronvolt gamma rays from blazars,” Arrowsmith explains. Unless the pair beam is perfectly collimated, or composed of pairs with exactly equal energies, instabilities were actively suppressed in the plasma.

While the experiment suggests that an intergalactic magnetic field remains the best explanation for the lack of gamma rays, the mystery is far from solved. Gregori explains, “The early universe is believed to be extremely uniform – but magnetic fields require electric currents, which in turn need gradients and inhomogeneities in the primordial plasma.” As a result, confirming the existence of such a field could point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, which may have dominated in the early universe.

More information could come with opening of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. This will comprise ground-based gamma-ray detectors planned across facilities in Spain and Chile, which will vastly improve on the resolutions of current-generation detectors.

The research is described in PNAS.

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What skills do you use every day in your job?

One thing I can say for sure that I got from working in academia is the ability to quickly read, summarize and internalize information from a bunch of sources. Journalism requires a lot of that. Being able to skim through papers – reading the abstract, reading the conclusion, picking the right bits from the middle and so on – that is a life skill.

In terms of other skills, I’m always considering who’s consuming what I’m doing rather than just thinking about how I’d like to say something. You have to think about how it’s going to be received – what’s the person on the street going to hear? Is this clear enough? If I were hearing this for the first time, would I understand it? Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes – be it the listener, reader or viewer – is a skill I employ every day.

What do you like best and least about your job?

The best thing is the variety. I ended up in this business and not in scientific research because of a desire for a greater breadth of experience. And boy, does this job have it. I get to talk to people around the world about what they’re up to, what they see, what it’s like, and how to understand it. And I think that makes me a much more informed person than I would be had I chosen to remain a scientist.

When I did research – and even when I was a science journalist – I thought “I don’t need to think about what’s going on in that part of the world so much because that’s not my area of expertise.” Now I have to, because I’m in this chair every day. I need to know about lots of stuff, and I like that feeling of being more informed.

I suppose what I like the least about my job is the relentlessness of it. It is a newsy time. It’s the flip side of being well informed, you’re forced to confront lots of bad things – the horrors that are going on in the world, the fact that in a lot of places the bad guys are winning.

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

When I started in science journalism, I wasn’t a journalist – I was a scientist pretending to be one. So I was always trying to show off what I already knew as a sort of badge of legitimacy. I would call some professor on a topic that I wasn’t an expert in yet just to have a chat to get up to speed, and I would spend a bunch of time showing off, rabbiting on about what papers I’d read and what I knew, just to feel like I belonged in the room or on that call. And it’s a waste of time. You have to swallow your ego and embrace the idea that you may sound like you don’t know stuff even if you do. You might sound dumber, but that’s okay – you’ll learn more and faster, and you’ll probably annoy people less.

In journalism in particular, you don’t want to preload the question with all of the things that you already know because then the person you’re speaking to can fill in those blanks – and they’re probably going to talk about things you didn’t know you didn’t know, and take your conversation in a different direction.

It’s one of the interesting things about science in general. If you go into a situation with experts, and are open and comfortable about not knowing it all, you’re showing that you understand that nobody can know everything and that science is a learning process.

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Physicists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) experiment at CERN have trapped and accumulated 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in less than 7 h. This accumulation rate is more than 20 times the previous record. Large ensembles of antihydrogen could be used to search for tiny, unexpected differences between matter and antimatter – which if discovered could point to physics beyond the Standard Model.

According to the Standard Model every particle has an antimatter counterpart – or antiparticle. It also says that roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang. But, today there is much more matter than antimatter in the visible universe, and the reason for this “baryon asymmetry” is one of the most important mysteries of physics.

The Standard Model predicts the properties of antiparticles. An antiproton, for example, has the same mass as a proton and the opposite charge. The Standard Model also predicts how antiparticles interact with matter and antimatter. If physicists could find discrepancies between the measured and predicted properties of antimatter, it could help explain the baryon asymmetry and point to other new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Powerful probe

Just as a hydrogen atom comprises a proton bound to an electron, an antihydrogen antiatom comprises an antiproton bound to an antielectron (positron). Antihydrogen offers physicists several powerful ways to probe antimatter at a fundamental level. Trapped antiatoms can be released in freefall to determine if they respond to gravity in the same way as atoms. Spectroscopy can be used to make precise measurements of how the electromagnetic force binds the antiproton and positron in antihydrogen with the aim of finding differences compared to hydrogen.

So far, antihydrogen’s gravitational and electromagnetic properties appear to be identical to hydrogen. However, these experiments were done using small numbers of antiatoms, and having access to much larger ensembles would improve the precision of such measurements and could reveal tiny discrepancies. However, creating and storing antihydrogen is very difficult.

Today, antihydrogen can only be made in significant quantities at CERN in Switzerland. There, a beam of protons is fired at a solid target, creating antiprotons that are then cooled and stored using electromagnetic fields. Meanwhile, positrons are gathered from the decay of radioactive nuclei and cooled and stored using electromagnetic fields. These antiprotons and positrons are then combined in a special electromagnetic trap to create antihydrogen.

This process works best when the antiprotons and positrons have very low kinetic energies (temperatures) when combined. If the energy is too high, many antiatoms will be escape the trap. So, it is crucial that the positrons and antiprotons to be as cold as possible.

Sympathetic cooling

Recently, ALPHA physicists have used a technique called sympathetic cooling on positrons, and in a new paper they describe their success.  Sympathetic cooling has been used for several decades to cool atoms and ions. It originally involved mixing a hard-to-cool atomic species with atoms that are relatively easy to cool using lasers. Energy is transferred between the two species via the electromagnetic interaction, which chills the hard-to-cool atoms.

The ALPHA team used beryllium ions to sympathetically cool positrons to 10 K, which is five degrees colder than previously achieved using other techniques. These cold positrons boosted the efficiency of the creation and trapping of antihydrogen, allowing the team to accumulate 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in less than 7 h. This is more than a 20-fold improvement over their previous record of accumulating 2000 antiatoms in 24 h.

Science fiction

“These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago,” says ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst, who is a Denmark’s Aarhus University.

Team member Maria Gonçalves, a PhD student at the UK’s Swansea University, says, “This result was the culmination of many years of hard work. The first successful attempt instantly improved the previous method by a factor of two, giving us 36 antihydrogen atoms”.

The effort was led by Niels Madsen of the UK’s Swansea University. He enthuses, “It’s more than a decade since I first realized that this was the way forward, so it’s incredibly gratifying to see the spectacular outcome that will lead to many new exciting measurements on antihydrogen”.

The cooling technique is described in Nature Communications.

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The Sun frequently ejects high-energy bursts of plasma that then travel through interplanetary space. These so-called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are accompanied by strong magnetic fields, which, when they interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, can trigger solar storms that can severely damage satellite systems and power grids.

In the early days of the solar system, the Sun was far more active than it is today and ejected much bigger CMEs. These might have been energetic enough to affect our planet’s atmosphere and therefore influence how life emerged and evolved on Earth, according to some researchers.

Since it is impossible to study the early Sun, astronomers use proxies – that is, stars that resemble it. These “exo-suns” are young G-, K- and M-type stars and are far more active than our Sun is today. They frequently produce CMEs with energies far larger than the most energetic solar flares recorded in recent times, which might not only affect their planets’ atmospheres, but may also affect the chemistry on these planets.

Until now, direct observational evidence for eruptive CME-like phenomena on young solar analogues has been limited. This is because clear signatures of stellar eruptions are often masked by the brightness of their host stars and flares on these. Measurements of Doppler shifts in optical lines have allowed astronomers to detect a few possible stellar eruptions associated with giant superflares on a young solar analogue, but these detections have been limited to single-wavelength data at “low temperatures” of around 10⁴ K. Studies at higher temperatures have been few and far between. And although scientists have tried out promising techniques, such as X-ray and UV dimming, to advance their understanding of these “cool” stars, few simultaneous multi-wavelength observations have been made.

A large Carrington-class flare from EK Draconis

On 29 March 2024, astronomers at Kyoto University in Japan detected a large Carrington-class flare – or superflare – in the far-ultraviolet from EK Draconis, a G-type star located approximately 112 light-years away from the Sun. Thanks to simultaneous observations in the ultraviolet and optical ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, they say they have now been able to obtain the first direct evidence for a multi-temperature CME from this young solar analogue (which is around 50 to 125 million years old and has a radius similar to the Sun).

The researchers’ campaign spanned four consecutive nights from 29 March to 1 April 2024. They made their ultraviolet observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and performed optical monitoring using three ground-based telescopes in Japan, Korea and the US.

They found that the far-ultraviolet and optical lines were Doppler shifted during and just before the superflare, with the ultraviolet observations showing blueshifted emission indicative of hot plasma. About 10 minutes later, the optical telescopes observed blueshifted absorption in the hydrogen Hα line, which indicates cooler gases. According to the team’s calculations, the hot plasma had a temperature of 100 000 K and was ejected at speeds of 300–550 km/s, while the “cooler” gas (with a temperature of 10 000 K) was ejected at 70 km/s.

“These findings imply that it is the hot plasma rather than the cool plasma that carries kinetic energy into planetary space,” explains study leader Kosuke Namekata. “The existence of this plasma suggests that such CMEs from our Sun in the past, if frequent and strong, could have driven shocks and energetic particles capable of eroding or chemically altering the atmosphere of the early Earth and the other planets in our solar system.”

“The discovery,” he tells Physics World, “provides the first observational link between solar and stellar eruptions, bridging stellar astrophysics, solar physics and planetary science.”

Looking forward, the researchers, who report their work in Nature Astronomy, now plan to conduct similar, multiwavelength campaigns on other young solar analogues to determine how frequently such eruptions occur and how they vary from star to star.

“In the near future, next-generation ultraviolet space telescopes such as JAXA’s LAPYUTA and NASA’s ESCAPADE, coordinated with ground-based facilities, will allow us to trace these events more systematically and understand their cumulative impact on planetary atmospheres,” says Namekata.

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Astronomers have long puzzled over the cause of a mysterious “glow” of very high energy gamma radiation emanating from the centre of our galaxy. One possibility is that dark matter – the unknown substance thought to make up more than 25% of the universe’s mass – might be involved. Now, a team led by researchers at Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) says that a flattened rather than spherical distribution of dark matter could account for the glow’s properties, bringing us a step closer to solving the mystery.

Dark matter is believed to be responsible for holding galaxies together. However, since it does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation, it can only be detected through its gravitational effects. Hence, while astrophysical and cosmological evidence has confirmed its presence, its true nature remains one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics.

“It’s extremely consequential and we’re desperately thinking all the time of ideas as to how we could detect it,” says Joseph Silk, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in the US and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and Sorbonne University in France who co-led this research together with the AIP’s Moorits Mihkel Muru. “Gamma rays, and specifically the excess light we’re observing at the centre of our galaxy, could be our first clue.”

Models might be too simple

The problem, Muru explains, is that the way scientists have usually modelled dark matter to account for the excess gamma-ray radiation in astronomical observations was highly simplified. “This, of course, made the calculations easier, but simplifications always fuzzy the details,” he says. “We showed that in this case, the details are important: we can’t model dark matter as a perfectly symmetrical cloud and instead have to take into account the asymmetry of the cloud.”

Muru adds that the team’s findings, which are detailed in Phys. Rev. Lett., provide a boost to the “dark matter annihilation” explanation of the excess radiation. According to the standard model of cosmology, all galaxies – including our own Milky Way – are nested inside huge haloes of dark matter. The density of this dark matter is highest at the centre, and while it primarily interacts through gravity, some models suggest that it could be made of massive, neutral elementary particles that are their own antimatter counterparts. In these dense regions, therefore, such dark matter species could be mutually annihilating, producing substantial amounts of radiation.

Pierre Salati, an emeritus professor at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France, who was not involved in this work, says that in these models, annihilation plays a crucial role in generating a dark matter component with an abundance that agrees with cosmological observations. “Big Bang nucleosynthesis sets stringent bounds on these models as a result of the overall concordance between the predicted elemental abundances and measurements, although most models do survive,” Salati says. “One of the most exciting aspects of such explanations is that dark matter species might be detected through the rare antimatter particles – antiprotons, positrons and anti-deuterons – that they produce as they currently annihilate inside galactic halos.”

Silvia Manconi of the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Energies (LPTHE), France, who was also not involved in the study, describes it as “interesting and stimulating”. However, she cautions that – as is often the case in science – reality is probably more complex than even advanced simulations can capture. “This is not the first time that galaxy simulations have been used to study the implications of the excess and found non-spherical shapes,” she says, though she adds that the simulations in the new work offer “significant improvements” in terms of their spatial resolution.

Manconi also notes that the study does not demonstrate how the proposed distribution of dark matter would appear in data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), or how it would differ quantitatively from observations of a distribution of old stars. Forthcoming observations with radio telescopes such as MeerKat and FAST, she adds, may soon identify pulsars in this region of the galaxy, shedding further light on other possible contributions to the excess of gamma rays.

New telescopes could help settle the question

Muru acknowledges that better modelling and observations are still needed to rule out other possible hypotheses. “Studying dark matter is very difficult, because it doesn’t emit or block light, and despite decades of searching, no experiment has yet detected dark matter particles directly,” he tells Physics World. “A confirmation that this observed excess radiation is caused by dark matter annihilation through gamma rays would be a big leap forward.”

New gamma-ray telescopes with higher resolution, such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array, could help settle this question, he says. If these telescopes, which are currently under construction, fail to find star-like sources for the glow and only detect diffuse radiation, that would strengthen the alternative dark matter annihilation explanation.

Muru adds that a “smoking gun” for dark matter would be a signal that matches current theoretical predictions precisely. In the meantime, he and his colleagues plan to work on predicting where dark matter should be found in several of the dwarf galaxies that circle the Milky Way.

“It’s possible we will see the new data and confirm one theory over the other,” Silk says. “Or maybe we’ll find nothing, in which case it’ll be an even greater mystery to resolve.”

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