For two weeks, medical experts monitor the astronauts as they remain indoors, live in isolation, and avoid physical touch, all to prevent harmful microbes from traveling to space.

For years, quad axel jumps seemed impossible. Then Ilia Malinin landed one in 2022. As he heads to the Milano Cortina Games, everyone wants to know what’s next.

Doctors, nurses, and other officers are increasingly being deployed to ICE detention centers. Some have resigned in protest, while others offer a rare look into bleak conditions.

China appears set for an in-flight abort test of its new-generation Mengzhou spacecraft next week in a key step for the country’s human spaceflight plans.

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A new way of creating arrays of ultracold neutral atoms could make it possible to build quantum computers with more than 100 000 quantum bits (qubits) – two orders of magnitude higher than today’s best machines. The approach, which was demonstrated by physicists at Columbia University in the US, uses optical metasurfaces to generate the forces required to trap and manipulate the atoms. According to its developers, this method is much more scalable than traditional techniques for generating arrays of atomic qubits.

“Neutral atom arrays have become a leading quantum technology, notably for quantum computing, where single atoms serve as qubits,” explains atomic physicist Sebastian Will, who co-led the study with his Columbia colleague Nanfang Yu. “However, the technology available so far to make these arrays limits array sizes to about 10 000 traps, which corresponds to a maximum of 10 000 atomic qubits.”

Building on a well-established technique

In common with standard ways of constructing atomic qubit arrays, the new method relies on a well-established technique known as optical tweezing. The principle of optical tweezing is that highly focused laser beams generate forces at their focal points that are strong enough to trap individual objects – in this case, atoms.

To create many such trapping sites while maintaining tight control of the laser’s light field, scientists typically use devices called spatial light modulators (SLMs) and acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) to split a single moderately intense laser beam into many lower-intensity ones. Such arrays have previously been used to trap thousands of atoms at once. In 2025, for example, researchers at the California Institute of Technology in the US created arrays containing up to 6100 trapped atoms – a feat that Will describes as “an amazing achievement”.

A superposition of tens of thousands of flat lenses

In the new work, which is detailed in Nature, Will, Yu and colleagues replaced these SLMs and AODs with flat optical surfaces made up of two-dimensional arrays of nanometre-sized “pixels”. These so-called metasurfaces can be thought of as a superposition of tens of thousands of flat lenses. When a laser beam hits them, it produces tens of thousands of focal points in a unique pattern. And because the pixels in the Columbia team’s metasurfaces are smaller than the wavelength of light they are manipulating (300 nm compared to 520 nm), Yu explains that they can use these metasurfaces to generate tweezer arrays directly, without the need for additional bulky and expensive equipment.

The Columbia researchers demonstrated this by trapping atoms in several highly uniform two-dimensional (2D) patterns, including a square lattice with 1024 trapping sites; patterns shaped like quasicrystals and the Statue of Liberty with hundreds of sites; and a circle made up of atoms spaced less than 1.5 microns apart. They also created a 3.5 mm diameter metasurface that contains more than 100 million pixels and used it to generate a 600 x 600 array of trapping sites. “This is two orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of current technologies,” Yu says.

Another advantage of using metasurfaces, Will adds, is that they are “extremely resilient” to high laser intensities. “This is what is needed to trap hundreds of thousands of neutral atom qubits,” he explains. “Metasurfaces’ laser power handling capabilities go several orders of magnitude beyond the state of the art with SLMs and AODs.”

Laying the groundwork

For arrays of up to 1000 focal points, the researchers showed that their metasurface-generated arrays can trap single atoms with a high level of control and precision and with high single-atom detection fidelity. This is essential, they say, because it demonstrates that the arrays’ quality is high enough to be useful for quantum computing.

While they are not there yet, Will says that the metasurface atomic tweezer arrays they developed “lay the critical groundwork for realizing neutral-atom quantum computers that operate with more than 100 000 qubits”. These high numbers, he adds, will be essential for realizing quantum computers that can achieve “quantum advantage” by outperforming classical computers. “The large number of qubits also allows for more ‘redundancy’ in the system to realize highly-efficient quantum error correction codes, which can make quantum computing – which is usually fragile – more resilient,” he says.

The Columbia team is now working on further improving the quality of their metasurfaces. “On the atomic arrays side, we will now try to actually fill such arrays with more than 100 000 atoms,” Will tells Physics World. “Doing this will require a much more powerful laser than we currently have, but it’s in a realistic range.”

The post Metasurfaces create super-sized neutral atom arrays for quantum computing appeared first on Physics World.

SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $175 million to fund DeepSky, a satellite constellation designed to gathering vast quantities of atmospheric data for artificial intelligence models. With the money provided by private equity investors Stonecourt Capital and HarbourVest Partners, Tomorrow.io plans to rapidly expand its “space infrastructure and intelligence platform, enabling unprecedented global atmospheric sensing and […]

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Golden Dome deputy program manager Marcia Holmes: ‘We are going to be easier to work with’

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The Federal Aviation Administration has approved plans for Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A as SpaceX shifts Falcon 9 launches away from the historic pad.

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A team of geologists found for the first time evidence linking regions of low seismic velocity and the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Learn how traces on Egyptian mummification jars were used to make perfume, bringing ancient fragrances and societies back to life.

Learn how repeated burn injuries may have acted as a form of natural selection, influencing human genes linked to healing and immune response.

Learn how seismic waves helped identify rare mantle earthquakes deep below Earth’s crust, offering new insight into the planet’s interior.

Efforts to correct historic undercount of poor, immigrant, rural, and minority populations are at risk, critics say

Researchers say they couldn’t find complete data for 10 trials that together enrolled tens of thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau

Coatings used by symbiotic residents of ant colonies may represent an evolutionary dead end

Kanzi, a bonobo studied for his language skills, understood make-believe objects

Finerenone boosts ovary function in mice and appears to help people with primary ovarian insufficiency produce mature eggs

Team in China sends data with entangled atoms, neutralizing backdoor hardware threats

Why can't you tickle yourself? Learn more about the process in the brain that prevents it from happening. 

How does static electricity work? Learn more about these electrical chargers and how they may have been a key to life. 

Discover how an ape playing tea party teaches us humans are not the only beings with complex mental lives.

A recent report found that carbon emissions caused by the Milano Cortina Olympics could lead to the loss of 5.5 square kilometers of snowpack and millions of metric tons of glacial ice.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Amanda Randles, who is a computer scientist and biomedical engineer at Duke University in the US. In a conversation with Physics World’s Margaret Harris, Randles explains how she uses physics-based, computationally intensive simulations to develop new ways to diagnose and treat human disease. She has also investigated how data from wearable devices such as smartwatches can be used identify signs of heart disease.

In 2024, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Randles its ACM Prize in Computing for her groundbreaking work. Harris caught up with Randles at the 2025 Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which brings prizewinning researchers and early-career researchers in computer science and mathematics to Heidelberg, Germany for a week of talks and networking.

Randles began her career as a physicist and she explains why she was drawn to the multidisciplinary research that she does today. Randles talks about her enduring love of computer coding and also reflects on what she might have done differently when starting out in her career.

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Learn more about termite evolution and how shedding key genes from their cockroach ancestors helped them build more complex colonies.