HELSINKI — Chinese commercial launch firm Landspace is preparing to attempt the country’s first orbital launch and booster landing this weekend with its Zhuque-3 rocket. Airspace closure notices issued under the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) indicate a launch attempt from the vicinity of Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center between around 11:00 p.m. Eastern Nov. […]

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ESA and Norway have signed a letter of intent and formed a joint working group to assess the feasibility of a new ESA Arctic Space Centre.

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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.

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Victoria, Canada / Seoul, South Korea – November 27th, 2025 – Pacific Geomatics Limited (PacGeo), a Canadian satellite imagery distributor, today announced a strategic partnership with SI Analytics (SIA), a […]

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Learn more about the fossilized trackway, which provides important insights into the movement of massive dinosaurs.

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ESA wrapped up the first day of a critical ministerial conference sounding upbeat about progress in securing funding for the next three years, despite a few warning signs.

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Learn how early reptiles began building the visual and brain skills needed for flight long before takeoff.

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SmartSky Networks does not plan to seek an injunction to block Gogo’s 5G air-to-ground rollout across the United States, despite prevailing in a patent-infringement lawsuit tied to the technology.

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Learn how several working groups with their own carving techniques built the iconic moai of Easter Island.

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BREMEN, Germany –  As the 23 member states of the European Space Agency meet this week to decide its budget for the next three years, its three major contributors – Germany, France and Italy – are signaling they will heavily support the agency. Yet even as ESA leaders push for unity, officials from those countries […]

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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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NASA has selected Northrop Grumman to provide cargo delivery services to the International Space Station once a spacecraft designed to deorbit the station is installed.

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The EPA is prioritizing review of new chemicals to be used in data centers. Experts say this could lead to the fast approval of new types of forever chemicals—with limited oversight.