Entanglement is a key resource for quantum computation and quantum technologies, but it can also tell us much about a computational problem. That is the conclusion of a recent paper by Achim Kempf and Einar Gabbassov – who are applied mathematicians at Canada’s University of Waterloo and are affiliated with Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Writing in Quantum Science and Technology, Gabbassov and Kempf show how entanglement plays a fundamental role in determining both the efficiency and the hardness of quantum computation problems.

They considered the role of entanglement in adiabatic quantum computing. This considers a landscape of hills and valleys (the problem) where the shape of the landscape depends on the problem to be solved.  A point on the landscape represents a candidate solution to the problem. This could be a configuration of possible states of three qubits, for example, or “a possible schedule for truck routes, or a particular shape for a pharmaceutical molecule” says Kempf. The actual solution to the problem is then the lowest (deepest) point in the landscape, which corresponds to the lowest energy point (the minimum point or minima).

This minima is easy to find if the landscape is smooth and has only one valley. The problem is harder if there are multiple valleys (a rugged landscape) since you might get stuck in a valley you believe to be the deepest, but which is not, and then you would have to climb out of it.

In a classical computation, every possible valley must be checked one-by-one to find the deepest one. However, Kempf explains that “in adiabatic quantum computing, the computer keeps track of all the valleys at once, by connecting them internally using entanglement”. Classically, many possibilities just means many independent guesses of the deepest valley. With quantum effects, when one part of the landscape shifts, it affects the whole landscape all at once. He explains that instead of checking each valley one-by-one, we can check them all simultaneously, significantly increasing the speed at which the lowest point in the landscape is found.

Shapeshifting landscape

When given a difficult problem with many valleys, there is a risk of getting stuck in a valley that is shallow and not being able to climb out and find the lowest energy state. Adiabatic quantum computing gets around this issue through a clever shapeshifting of the landscape.

The process starts with an easy landscape, comprising only one valley. Since the solution is simple, the the deepest valley corresponding to the lowest energy state is occupied quickly. Gradually the landscape is changed to contain more and more valleys, more closely approximating the more complicated landscape whose lowest point is the solution.

The lowest point changes with each change in the landscape, but the trick is that if the changes in the landscape are small enough, the deepest part of the landscape and therefore the lowest energy state will always be occupied. This is the basic principle of adiabatic quantum computing often used in resource allocation, routing and logistics, and machine learning where there can be huge numbers of possible variable configurations.

Difficulty and computation time

In their work, Gabbassov and Kempf explore how the amount of entanglement required to find the deepest valley links to the difficulty and time needed to complete the problem.

A difficult problem would be a rugged landscape consisting of multiple valleys of similar depth located far apart from one another. To occupy the lowest energy state, we need to occupy all these valleys simultaneously. The entanglement needed to do this is greater since the interconnectedness between the valleys is harder to maintain when they are further apart (they have a large Hamming distance). The problem is also harder to solve since it is more difficult to discern which of these valleys is the deepest when they have a similar depth – being close in energy. This added difficulty is reflected in a need for a greater amount of entanglement to keep track of the valleys but also in a greater amount of time needed to distinguish the depths of the valleys to find the deepest one.

Gabbassov and Kempf show that a large amount of entanglement is needed at these difficult, bottleneck points of the computation. This makes it even more difficult to keep track of the valleys and more time is required to avoid falling into the wrong one. This is also where classical computation would normally slow down. Quantum effects are therefore most valuable and are most crucial at these points, proving essential for identifying when and where adiabatic quantum computation can provide a genuine advantage over classical methods.

Kempf summarizes this as, “the hardness of any computational problem, directly translates into the corresponding widespreadness of entanglement the quantum computer needs to keep track of all the valleys so that it can find the minimum point. Calculational hardness therefore means the need for sophisticated entanglement. Since entanglement is a precious and fragile resource, a hard problem that requires a lot of it can only be solved slowly.”

Entanglement therefore proves to be a useful tool not just for significantly increasing the computational speed of problems but also in characterizing problem difficulty and computation speed. As Gabbassov notes “if we want to devise faster quantum algorithms, we should look not just at the amount of entanglement but also at how this entanglement redistributes/flows” and therefore the structure of the problem. Their work shows that the amount of entanglement used as a resource is more subtle than just providing a general computational speed-up.

 

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As NASA prepares to launch a new crew to the International Space Station, the agency has yet to decide which spacecraft it will use for the next crew-rotation mission.

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A few years ago, Swiss seismologist Verena Simon noticed a striking shift in the pattern of seismic activity and micro earthquakes in the Mont Blanc region. She found that microquakes in the area, which straddles Switzerland, France and Italy, have fallen into an annual pattern since 2015.

Simon and colleagues at the Swiss Seismological Service in fact found that this annual pattern is linked to heat waves driven by climate change. But they are not the only researchers finding such geophysical links to climate change. There is growing evidence that global warming could cause changes in seismicity, volcanic activity and other such hazards.

In the first eight years from 2006, Simon’s team saw no clear pattern. But then from 2015 they found that seismicity always increases in autumn and stays at a higher level until winter. The researchers wondered if the seasonal pattern was linked to a known increase in meltwater infiltration into the Mont Blanc massif in late summer and autumn every year.

Seasonal seismic trends

Scientists have long known that when water percolates underground it increases the pressure in gaps, or pores, in rocks, which alters the balance of forces on faults, leading to slips – and triggering seismic activity.

In the late 1990s researchers analysed water flow into the 12 km long Mont Blanc tunnel, which links France and Italy (La Houille Blanche 86 78). They also found a yearly pattern, with a rapid increase in water entering the tunnel between August and October. The low mineral content of the water and results from tracer tests, using fluorescent dyes injected into a glacier crevasse on the massif, confirmed that this increased flow was fresh water from snow and glacier melt.

To explore the seasonal trend in the water table, Simon and colleagues created a hydrological model (a simplified mathematical model of a real-world water flow system) using the tunnel inflow data; plus metrological, hydrological and snow-pack data from elsewhere in the Alps. They also included information on how water diffuses into rocks, alters pore pressure and increases seismic activity (Earth and Planetary Sci. Lett. 666 119372).

When combined with their seismicity data, autumn seismic activity appeared to be triggered by spring surface runoff, which arises from melting glacial ice and snow. The exact timing depends on the depth of the microquakes, with shallow quakes being linked to surface runoff from the previous year, while there is a two-year delay between runoff and deeper quakes. Essentially, their work found a link between meltwater and seismic activity in the Mont Blanc massif; but it could not explain why the autumn increase in microquakes only started in 2015.

Perhaps the answer lies in historic meteorological data of the area. In 2015 the Alps experienced a prolonged, record-breaking heatwave, which led to very many high-altitude rockfalls in a number of areas, including in the Mont Blanc massif, as rock-wall permafrost warmed. Data also show that since then there has been a big increase in days when the average temperatures in the Swiss Alps is above 0 °C. These so-called “positive degree days” are known to lead to increased glacial melt.

All of these findings support the idea that the onset of seasonal seismic activity is linked to climate change-induced increases in meltwater and alterations in flow paths. Simon explains that rock collapses can alter the pathways that water follows as it infiltrates into the ground. Combined with increases in meltwater, this can lead to pore-pressure changes that increase seismicity and trigger it in new places.

These small earthquakes in the Mont Blanc massif are unlikely to trouble local communities. But the researchers did find that at times the seismic hazard – an indicator of how often and intensely the earth could shake in a specific area – rose by nearly four orders of magnitude, compared with pre-2015 level. They warn that similar processes in glaciated areas that experience larger earthquakes than the Alps, such as the Himalayas, might be less gentle.

Extreme rainfall

Climate change is also altering water-flow patterns by increasing the intensity of extreme weather events and heavy rainfall. And there is already evidence that such extreme precipitation can influence seismic activity.

In 2020 Storm Alex brought record-breaking rainfall to the south-east of France, with some areas seeing more than 600 mm in 24 hours. In the following 100 days 188 earthquakes were recorded in the Tinée valley, in south-eastern France. Although all were below two in magnitude, that volume of microquakes would usually be spread over a five-year period in the region. A 2024 analysis carried out by seismologists in France concluded that increased fluid pressure from the extreme rainfall caused a stressed fault system to slip, initiating a seismic swarm – a localized cluster of earthquakes, without a single “mainshock”, that take place over a relatively short period of days, months or years (see figure 1).

There have been other examples in Europe of seismic activity linked to extreme rainfall. For instance, in September 2002 a catastrophic storm in western Provence in southern France, with similar rainfall levels as Storm Alex, triggered a clear and sudden increase in seismic activity, a study concluded. While another analysis found that an unusual series of 47 earthquakes over 12 hours in central Switzerland in August 2005 was likely caused by three days of intense rainfall.

According to Marco Bohnhoff from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany, the link between fluid infiltration into the ground and seismicity is well understood – from fluid injection for oil and gas production, to geothermal development and heavy rainfall. “The pore pressure is increased if there is a small load on top, enforced by water, and that changes the pressure conditions in the underground, which can release energy that is already stored there,” Bohnhoff explains.

A good example of this is the Koyna Dam, one of India’s largest hydroelectric projects, which consists of four dams. Every year during the monsoon season the water level in the reservoir behind the dams increases by about 20–25 m, and with this comes an increase in seismic activity. “After the rain stops and the water level decreases, the earthquake activity stops,” says Bohnhoff. “So, the earthquake activity distribution nicely follows the water level.”

Rising seas and seismic activity

According to Bohnoff, anything that increases the pressure underground could trigger earthquakes. But he has also been studying the effect of another consequence of climate change: sea-level rise.

Undisputed and accelerating, sea-level rise is driven by two main effects linked to climate change: the expansion of ocean waters as they warm, and the melting of land ice, mainly the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. According to the World Meteorological Organization, sea levels will rise by half a metre by 2100 if emissions follow the Paris Agreement, but increases of up to two metres cannot be ruled out if emissions are even higher.

As ocean waters increase, so does the load on the underground. “This will change the global earthquake activity rate,” says Bohnhoff. In a study published in 2024, Bohnhoff and colleagues found that sea-level rise will advance the seismic clock, leading to more and in some cases stronger earthquakes (Seismological Research Letters 95 2571).

“It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden there will be earthquakes everywhere, but earthquakes that would have occurred sometime in the future will occur sooner,” he says. “We’re changing the regularity of earthquakes.” The risk created by this is greatest in coastal mega-cities, located near critical fault zones, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US; Istanbul in Turkey; and Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan.

The findings cannot be used to predict individual earthquakes – in fact, it is very difficult to predict how much the seismic clock will advance, as it depends on the amount of sea-level rise. But there are faults around the world that are critically stressed and close to the end of their seismic cycle.

“Faults that are very, very close to failure, where basically there would be an earthquake, say in 100 years or 50 years, they might be advanced and that might occur very soon,” he explains.

Between a rock and a hard place

Another significant geological hazard linked to climate change and heavy rainfall is volcanic activity. In December 2021 there was devastating eruption of Mount Semeru, on the Indonesian island of Java. “There was a really heavy rainfall event and that caused the collapse of the lava dome at the summit,” says Jamie Farquharson, a volcanologist at Niigata University in Japan.

This led to a series of eruptions, pyroclastic flows and “lahars” – devastating flows of mud and volcanic debris – that killed at least 69 people and damaged more than 5000 homes. Although it is challenging to attribute this specific event to climate change, Farquharson says that it is a good example of how global warming-induced heavy rainfall could exacerbate volcanic hazards.

Farquharson and colleagues noticed links between ground deformations and rainfall at several volcanoes. “We started seeing some correlations and thought why shouldn’t we? Because from a rock mechanics point of view, these volcanoes would be more prone to fracturing and other kinds of failure when the pore pressure is high,” says Farquharson. “And one of the easiest ways of increasing pore pressure is by dumping a load of rain onto the volcano.”

Such rock fracturing can open new pathways for magma to propagate towards the surface. This can happen deep underground, but also near the surface, for instance by causing a chunk of the flank to slide off a volcano. As with earthquakes, these changes could alter the timing of eruptions. For volcanoes that might be primed for an eruption, where the magma chamber is inflating, extreme rainfall events might hasten an eruption. But as Farquharson explains, such rainfall events “could bring something that was going to happen at an unspecified point in the future across a tipping point”.

A few years ago Farquharson, together with atmospheric scientist Falk Amelung of the University of Miami in the US, published a study showing that if global warming continues at current rates, rainfall-linked volcanic activity – such as dome explosions and flank collapses – will increase at more than 700 volcanoes around the globe (R. Soc. Open Sci. 9 220275).

To explore the impact of rainfall, Farquharson and Amelung analysed decades of reports on volcanic activity from the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program. This showed that heavy or extreme rainfall has been linked to eruptions and other hazards, such as lahars at at least 174 volcanoes (see figure 2).

There are 1234 volcanoes on land that have been active in the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began around 12,000 years ago. The geologists used nine different models to explore how climate change might alter rainfall at these volcanos. They found that 716 of these volcanoes will experience more extreme rainfall as global temperatures continue to rise. The models did not agree on whether rainfall will become more or less extreme at 407 of the volcanoes, and the remaining 111 are in regions expected to see a drop in heavy rain.

Volcanic regions where heavy rainfall is expected to increase include the Caribbean islands, parts of the Mediterranean, the East African Rift system, and most of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

In fact, volcanic hazards in many of these regions have already been linked to heavy rainfall. For instance, in 1998 extreme rainfall in Italy led to devastating debris flows on Mount Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei, near Naples, killing 160 people.

Elsewhere, rainfall has sparked explosive activity at Mount St Helens, in the Cascade Mountains of Canada and the western US. Other volcanoes in this range, which is part of the Ring of Fire, put major population centres at significant lahar risk, due to their steep slopes. In both the Caribbean and Indonesia – the world’s most volcanically active country, heavy rainfall has triggered explosive activity and eruptions at active volcanoes.

Farquharson and Amelung warn that if heavy rainfall increases in these regions as predicted, it will heighten an already considerable threat to life, property and infrastructure. As we enter a new era of much higher resolution climate modelling, Farquharson hopes that we will “be able to get a much better handle on exactly which [volcanic] systems could be affected the most”. This may enable scientists to better estimate how hazards will change at specific geographical locations.

Fire and ice

Scientists are also concerned about what will happen to volcanoes currently buried under ice as the climate warms. Through modelling work and studying volcanoes that sat below the Patagonian Ice Sheet during and at the end of the last ice age, Brad Singer, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, and colleagues have been exploring the impact of deglaciation on volcanic processes.

They found that ice loss can lead to an increase in large explosive eruptions. This occurs because as the ice melts, the weight on the volcano drops, which allows magma to expand and put pressure on the rock within the volcano. Also, as pressure from the ice reduces, dissolved volatile gases like water and carbon dioxide separate from the magma to form gas bubbles. This further increases the pressure in the magma chamber, which can promote an eruption.

But each volcano responds differently to ice. Singer’s team has been dating and studying the chemical composition of lava flow samples from South America, to track the behaviour of volcanoes over tens of thousands of years, through the build-up of the ice and after deglaciation.

The Patagonian Ice Sheet began to melt very rapidly about 18,000 years ago and by about 16,000 years ago it was gone. “We develop a timeline and put compositions on that timeline and look to see if there were any changes in the composition of the magmas that were erupting as a function of the thickness of the ice sheet,” explains Singer. “We are finding some really interesting things.”

The Puyehue-Cordón Caulle and Mocho-Choshuenco volcanic complexes in southern Chile both erupt rhyolitic magmas. But they were not producing this type of magma before the ice retreated, as Singer and colleagues found (GSA Bulletin 136 5262) (see figure 3).

“We don’t know for sure that [magma change] is attributable to the glaciation, but it is curious that immediately following the deglaciation we start to see the first appearance of these highly explosive rhyolitic magmas,” says Singer. The volcanologists suspect that the ice sheet reduced eruptions at these volcanos, leading magma to accumulate over thousands of years. “That accumulated reservoir can evolve into this explosive dangerous magma type called rhyolite,” Singer adds.

But that didn’t always happen. The Calbuco volcano, in southern Chile, has always erupted andesite, an intermediate-composition magma. “It’s never erupted basalt, it’s never erupted rhyolite, it’s erupting andesite, regardless of whether the ice is there or not,” explains Singer.

There are also differences in how quickly volcanoes reacted to the deglaciation. At Mocho-Choshuenco, for example, there was a large rhyolite eruption about 3000 years after the loss of ice. Singer suspects that the delay “reflects the time that it took to exsolve the volatiles from the rhyolite”. But at the nearby, very active Villarrica volcano, there was no such delay. It experienced a huge eruption 16,800 years ago, almost immediately after the ice disappeared.

Melting ice sheets

Volcanic activity from melting ice sheets, due to current climate change, is probably not a direct hazard to people. But below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits the West Antarctic Rift – a system that is thought to contain at least 100 active volcanoes.

A major contributor to global sea-level rise, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is particularly vulnerable to collapse as temperatures rise. If they become more active and explosive, the volcanoes of the West Antarctic Rift System could accelerate ice melting and sea-level rise.

“The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could remove the surface load that’s preventing eruptions from occurring,” says Singer. Such eruptions could bring lava and heat to the base of the ice sheet, which is dangerous because melting at the base can cause the ice to move faster into the ocean. The resulting rising sea levels could go on to advance the seismic clock and trigger earthquakes.

In the long run, increased volcanic activity will impact global climate, with the cumulative effect of multiple eruptions contributing to global warming thanks to a build-up of greenhouse gases. Essentially, a positive feedback loop is created, as melting ice caps, helped by volcanoes, could lead to more earthquakes. Managing the Earth’s warming and protecting the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets is therefore more crucial than ever.

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The near and far sides of the Moon are very different in their chemical composition, their magmatic activity and the thickness of their crust. The reasons for this difference are not fully understood, but a new study of rocks brought back to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 mission has provided the beginnings of an answer. According to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, who measured iron and potassium isotopes in four samples from the Moon’s gigantic South Pole-Aitken Basin (SPA), the discrepancy likely stems from the giant meteorite impact that created the basin.

China has been at the forefront of lunar exploration in recent years, beginning in 2007 with the launch of the lunar orbiter Chang’e-1. Since then, it has carried out several uncrewed missions to the lunar surface. In 2019, one of these, Chang’e-4, became the first craft to touch down on the far side of the Moon, landing in the SPA’s Von Kármán crater. This 2500-km-wide feature extends from the near to the far side of the Moon and is one of the oldest known impact craters in our solar system, with an estimated age of between 4.2 and 4.3 billion years old.

Next in the series was Chang’e-5, which launched in November 2020 and subsequently returned 1.7 kg of samples from the near side of the Moon – the first lunar samples brought back to Earth in nearly 50 years. Hot on the heels of this feat came the return of samples from the far side of the Moon aboard Chang’e-6 after it launched on 3 May 2024.

A hypothesis that aligns with previous results

When scientists at the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics and colleagues analysed these samples, they found that the ratio of potassium-41 to potassium-39 is greater in the samples from the SPA basin than in samples from the near side collected by Chang’e-5 and NASA’s Apollo missions. According to study leader Heng-Ci Tian, this potassium isotope ratio is a relic of the giant impact that formed this basin.

Tian explains that the impact created such intense temperatures and pressures that many of the volatile elements in the Moon’s crust and mantle – including potassium – evaporated and escaped into space. “Since the lighter potassium-39 isotope would more readily evaporate than the heavier potassium-41 isotope, the impact produced this greater ratio of potassium-41 to potassium-39,” says Tian. He adds that this explanation is also supported by earlier results, such as Chang’e 6’s discovery that the mantle on the far side contains less water than the near side.

Before drawing this conclusion, the researchers, who report their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, needed to rule out several other possible explanations. The options they considered included whether irradiation of the lunar surface by cosmic rays could have produced an unusual isotopic ratio, and whether magma melting, cooling and eruptive processes could have changed the composition of the basaltic rocks. They also examined the possibility that contamination from meteorites could be responsible. Ultimately, though, they concluded that these processes would have had only negligible effects.

The effects of the impact

Tian says the team’s work represents the first evidence that an impact event of this size can volatilize materials deep within the Moon. But that’s not all. The findings also offer the first direct evidence that large impacts play an important role in transforming the Moon’s crust and mantle. Fewer volatiles, for example, would limit volcanic activity by suppressing magma formation – something that would explain why the lunar far side contains so few of the vast volcanic plains, or maria, that appear dark to us when we look at the Moon’s near side from Earth.

“The loss of moderately volatile elements – and likely also highly volatile elements – would have suppressed magma generation and volcanic eruptions on the far side,” Tian says. “We therefore propose that the SPA impact contributed, at least partially, to the observed hemispheric asymmetry in volcanic distribution.”

Technical challenges

Having hypothesized that moderately volatile elements could be an effective means of tracing lunar impact effects, Tian and colleagues were eager to use the Chang’e-6 samples to investigate how such a large impact affects the shallow and deep lunar interior. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. “A major technical challenge was that the Chang’e‑6 samples consist mainly of fine-grained materials, making it difficult to select large individual grains,” he recalls. “To overcome this, we developed an ultra‑low‑consumption potassium isotope analytical protocol, which ultimately enabled high‑precision potassium isotope measurements at the milligram level.”

The current results are preliminary, and the researchers plan to analyse additional moderately volatile element isotopes to verify their conclusions. “We will also combine these findings with numerical modelling to evaluate the global-scale effects of the SPA impact,” Tian tells Physics World.

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University votes to consider ending all studies at Oregon National Primate Research Center. But cost and feasibility are still in doubt

A little more than a year after dismissing the moon as a “distraction,” Elon Musk says SpaceX will focus on lunar settlement before sending humans to Mars.

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Learn about a new Kreutz sungrazing comet that could be lighting up our skies come April 2026.

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Two African science journalists – Paul Adepoju and Mkhululi Chimoio – have won the “Quantum Pitch Competition”, organized by Physics World and Physics Magazine to mark the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ).

The competition was launched at the 2025 World Conference of Science Journalists in Pretoria, South Africa, where delegates to a science-writing workshop were invited to submit story ideas on any aspect of quantum science and technology

Chimoio’s winning entry is an article covering the work of the South African physicist Lindiwe Khumalo, who carries out experiments on quantum sensors in a former gold mine 3 km underground.

Khmalo uses the natural shielding from 3 km of rock to test muon-based sensors and ultra-low-noise interferometric measurements, contributing to dark-matter detection, neutrino studies, and precision metrology.

“It’s a compelling human story about an African physicist working in an extreme environment usually associated with heavy industry, not quantum physics,” says Chimoio, whose article will be published in Physics World soon.

Chimoio is a Zimbabwean-born investigative journalist, now based in South Africa. He specializes in geopolitics, technology, security and socio-economic issues, with some of his writing appearing in Nature Africa and Africa Uncensored.

Adepoju’s winning piece – describing the discovery of large-scale galactic motion using the emission produced by tiny quantum “spin-flips” in hydrogen atoms – is published today in Physics Magazine.

Adepoju is a freelance journalist and podcaster based in Ibadan, Nigeria, whose has written for publications such as Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American.

In his pitch-winning story, Adepoju describes the recent discovery of rotation within a galaxy-filled filament that stretches over 50 million light years. The cosmic winding, which had never been directly measured in a single filament, was found using hydrogen-emission data from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa and could lead to a new way to probe dark matter.

IYQ 2025 ends this week at an official closing ceremony in Accra, Ghana, on 10 and 11 February, the full programme for which can be read here.

• Physics World and Physics Magazine would like to thank all of the writers who submitted pitches to the contest. We hope that this endeavour will lead to more quantum-inspired stories by science journalists across the world.

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Germany’s top intelligence officials made waves last year by calling for the creation of a European spy network to lessen Europe’s dependence on American intelligence. After Washington’s sudden freeze of American intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March, German officials — and their European counterparts — have grown increasingly attuned to deficiencies in key capabilities they […]

The post There’s a way forward for sovereign European space intel, but is there the will? appeared first on SpaceNews.

A major upgrade to the LHCb experiment at CERN is under threat after the UK did not commit any further contributions towards the project. The decision by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to defund the plan means that unless the decision if overturned, the experiment will now likely finish operation in 2033.

LHCb is one of the four large experiments based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It specializes in the measurements of the parameters of charge-parity (CP) violation in the interactions of b- and c-hadrons, studies of which help to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe.

LHCb began recording its first data in 2009 when the LHC began operations and started its main research programme from 2010.

At the end of 2018 it was the shut down for upgrades, which were completed in 2022. That led to a vast increase in the amount of data the experiment could collect, allowing significant improvements in precision for many measurements.

The detector is expected to operate until 2033 by which time it would have reached the end of its lifetime after years of intense radiation damage.

LHCb is operated by the LHCb collaboration, which involves about 1700 scientists and technicians from over 100 institutions in 22 countries around the world with work on the machine having already resulted in over 800 publications.

The UK is one of the leading countries working on LHCb – four of the eight spokespeople for the experiment have come from the UK – and over the past decade physicists from the UK have been planning an upgrade to experiment dubbed LHCb upgrade II.

This would take advantage of the upgrade to the LHC – the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) – and offer an order of magnitude increase in luminosity over upgrade I.

The second upgrade would provide another boost in capability to answer questions such as whether all CP-violation phenomena are consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics or require an extended theory as well as how the strong interaction binds together the exotic tetraquark and pentaquark states that have been discovered by LHCb.

At a cost of about £150m with the construction phase beginning in 2027, the upgrade components would be installed by 2035 before collecting data for five to six years until the HL-LHC is shut down in 2040.

UK researchers submitted a proposal to the UKRI infrastructure fund in 2021 to begin work on the upgrade and was awarded £49.4m in 2022.

Some £5m has been spent on the pre-construction phase, in which agreements have been made with international partners on the scope and design of the improved detector.

Yet on 19 December researchers working on the project were sent a letter telling them that the remaining funding has “not been prioritised” and will now be cancelled.

“It was a complete shock,” says Tim Gershon from the University of Warwick, who is principal investigator for the project in the UK and is set to become spokesperson for the international collaboration in July.

‘Out in the cold’

The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) core budget has been held relatively flat from £835m to £842m from 2026 to 2030. Yet the council said that projects would need to be cut given inflation, rising energy costs as well as “unfavourable movements in foreign exchange rates” that have increased STFC’s annual costs by over £50m a year.

The STFC, which is one of the main funding council belonging to UKRI, has already said that it needs to reduce spending from the core budget by at least 30% over 2024/2025 levels at the same time it also announced that it will need to reduce the number of projects that are funded by its infrastructure fund.

It’s like paying to heat your house but then sitting outside in the cold

Tim Gershon

Four projects will now not be prioritised. They include two UK national facilities: the Relativistic Ultrafast Electron Diffraction and Imaging facility and a mass spectrometry centre dubbed C‑MASS.

The other two are international particle-physics projects: the upgrade to LHCb as well as a contribution to the Electron-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory that is currently being built by a collaboration of 40 countries.

“This is more terrible news for physics, for the UK and for global scientific progress. The withdrawal of funding in this abrupt way is incredibly damaging to our international reputation as a science superpower and could cause long-term damage to the UK economy,” notes Paul Howarth, president-elect of the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World. “But even more important is the harm this cut will cause to human understanding of the universe and human progress.”

Gershon adds that the LHCb collaboration were not asked for any input before the decision was made and since then they have trying to work out what it means.

“The UK pays the CERN subscription, which pays for the accelerator, but needs to also invest in experiments to obtain scientific return from this,” says Gershon. “It’s like paying to heat your house but then sitting outside in the cold.”

It might be possible to get funding from elsewhere in the short-term to cover the initial work on the upgrade, but Gershon sats that without investment from UKRI/STFC, the project will be dead as it would not be possible for international partners to go ahead without UK involvement on the timescale dictated by the LHC schedule.

That would mean the LHCb stops operating from 2033 and does not take advantage of the HL-LHC. “The move also goes against the European Strategy for Particle Physics roadmap, of which the top priority is fully exploiting the HL-LHC,” says Gershon. “Without LHCb upgrade, it won’t be possible to do that.”

Howarth adds there are “demonstrable impacts on UK growth and prosperity” for such research. “An earlier upgrade to the LHCb experiment generated about £15m in contracts for more than 80 UK companies,” he adds. “This funding cut means the upgrade is unlikely to go ahead, so all this business for UK innovators is lost. We urge the government to step back and consider how its new funding strategy will impact UK science.”

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Nothing stays static in today’s job market. Physicist Gabi Steinbach recalls that about five years ago, fresh physics PhDs could snag lucrative data-scientist positions in companies without job experience. “It was a really big boom,” says Steinbach, at the University of Maryland, US. Then, schools started formal data-science programmes that churned out job-ready candidates to compete with physicists. Now, the demand for physicists as data scientists “has already subsided,” she says.

Today, new graduates face an uncertain job market, as companies wrestle with the role of artificial intelligence (AI), and due to the funding cuts of science research agencies in the US. But those with physics degrees should stay optimistic, according to Matt Thompson, a physicist at Zap Energy, a fusion company based in Seattle, Washington.

“I don’t think the value of a physics education ever changes,” says Thompson, who has mentored many young physicists. “It is not a flash-in-the-pan major where the funding and jobs come from changes. The value of the discipline truly is evergreen.”

Evergreen discipline

In particular, a physics degree prepares you for numerous technical roles in emerging industrial markets. Thompson’s company, for example, offers a number of technical roles that could fit physicists with a bachelor’s, master’s or PhD.

A good way to set yourself up for success is to begin your job hunt two years before you expect to graduate, says Steinbach, who guides young researchers in career development. “Many students underestimate the time it takes,” she says.

The early start should help with the “internal” work of job hunting, as Steinbach calls it, where students figure out their personal ambitions. “I always ask students or postdocs, what’s your ultimate goal?” she says. “What industry do you want to work in? Do you like teamwork? Do you want a highly technical job?”

Then, the external job hunt begins. Students can find formal job listings on Physics World Jobs,  APS Physics Jobs and in the Physics World Careers and APS Careers guides, as well as companies’ websites or on LinkedIn. Another way to track opportunities is to read investment news, says Monica Volk, who has spent the last decade hiring for companies, including Silicon Valley start-ups. She follows “Term Sheet,” a Fortune newsletter, to see which companies have raised money. “If they just raised $20 million, they’re going to spend that money on hiring people,” she says.

Volk encourages applicants to tailor their résumé for each specific job. “Your résumé should tell a story, where the next chapter in the story is the job that you’re applying for,” she says.

Hiring managers want a CV to show that a candidate from academia can “hit deadlines, communicate clearly, collaborate and give feedback.” Applicants can show this capability by describing their work specifically. “Talk about different equipment you’ve used, or the applications your research has gone into,” says Carly Saxton, the VP of HR at Quantum Computing, Inc. (QCI), based in New Jersey, in the US. Thompson adds that describing your academic research with an emphasis on results – reports written, projects completed and the importance of a particular numerical finding – will give those in industry the confidence that you can get something done.

It’s also important to research the company you’re applying for. Generative AI can help with this, says Valentine Zatti, the HR director for Alice & Bob, a quantum computing start-up in France. For example, she has given ChatGPT a LinkedIn page and asked it to summarize the recent news about a company and list its main competitors. She is careful to verify the veracity of the summaries.

When writing a CV , it’s important to use the keywords from the job description. Many companies use applicant-tracking systems, which automatically filter out CV without those keywords. This may involve learning the jargon of the industry. For example, when Thompson looked for jobs in the defence sector, he found out they called cameras “EO/IR,” short for electro-optic infrared instruments. Once he started referring to his expertise using those words, “I got a lot better response,” he says.

Generative AI can also assist you in putting together a résumé. For example, it can make résumés, which should be one page long, more concise, or help you better match your language to the job description. But Steinbach cautions that you must stay vigilant. “If it’s writing things that don’t sound like you, or if you can’t remember what’s written on it, you will fail at your interview,” says Steinbach.

Companies fill job openings quickly, especially right now, so Thompson also recommends focusing on networking.  “It’s fine to apply for jobs you see online, but that should be maybe 20 percent of your effort,” he says. “Eighty percent should be talking to people.” One effective approach is through company internships before graduation. “We jump at the opportunity to hire former interns,” says Saxton.

Thompson suggests arranging a half-hour call with someone whose job looks interesting to you. You can find people through your alumni networks, LinkedIn or APS’s Industry Mentoring for Physicists (IMPact) program, which connects students and early-career physicists from any country with industrial physicists worldwide for career guidance. You can also attend career fairs at your university and those
organized by the APS.

Skills showcase

Once a company is interested in you, you can expect several rounds of interviews. The first will be about the logistics of the job – whether you’d need to relocate, for example. After that, for technical roles you can expect technical interviews. Recently, companies have encountered candidates secretively using AI to cheat during these interviews. They may eliminate the candidate for cheating. “If you don’t know how to do something, it’s better to be honest about it than to use AI to get through a test,” says Saxton. “Companies are willing to teach and develop core skills.”

However, with transparency, showcasing AI skills could be a boon during job interviews. A 2025 survey from the American Institute of Physics found that around one in four students with a physics bachelor’s degree (see the graph) and two in five with physics PhDs routinely use AI for work. The report also found that one in 12 physics bachelor’s degree-earners and nearly one in five physics doctorate-earners who entered the workforce in 2024 have jobs in AI development.

The emerging quantum industry is also a promising job market for physicists. Globally, investors put nearly $2 billion in quantum technology in 2024, while public investments in quantum in early 2025 reached $10 billion. “You’ll have an opportunity to work for companies in their building stage, and you’re able to earn equity as part of that company,” says Saxton.

Alice & Bob are in the midst of hiring 100 new staff, 25 of whom are quantum physicists, including experimentalists and theorists, based in Paris. Zatti, in particular, wants to boost the number of women working in the field.

Currently, the pool of qualified candidates in quantum is small. Consequently, Alice & Bob can screen CVs manually, says Zatti. Both Alice & Bob and US-based QCI say they are willing to hire internationally. QCI is willing to pay legal fees for candidates to help them continue working in the US, says Saxton.

It’s important to stay flexible in today’s job market. “Don’t ignore current trends, but don’t get married to them either,” suggests Steinbach. Thompson agrees, adding that curiosity is key. “You just have to be creative. If you can open your aperture to all of private industry, there’s a lot of opportunity out there.”

• This article was first published in APS Careers 2026.

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General Galactic, cofounded by a former SpaceX engineer, plans to test its water-based propellant this fall. If successful, it could help usher in a new era of space travel. That's a big “if.”

Green hydrogen is hydrogen gas produced by splitting water using electrolysis powered entirely by renewable electricity. It is important because it provides a clean fuel option for industries that are very difficult to decarbonise using other methods. Sectors such as steel, cement, glass, and chemicals require extremely high temperatures (1,000–1,600°C), which are hard to achieve reliably or cheaply with electricity alone, so they still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

In this work, the researchers examined whether using green hydrogen actually reduces emissions across different sectors, comparing it not only with fossil fuels but also with other low‑emission alternatives such as heat pumps, electric vehicles, and biofuels. They carried out a prospective life cycle assessment covering all stages of hydrogen (production, transport, and use) using projected 2030 conditions that include cleaner electricity grids, improved electrolyser efficiency, updated industrial processes, and expected hydrogen transport methods. They then compared green hydrogen to alternative technologies across eight applications: producing methanol, ammonia, steel, and aviation fuels; powering fuel‑cell passenger cars; providing low‑temperature domestic heat; supplying high‑temperature industrial heat; and balancing the electricity grid over long periods.

Across all eight applications, green hydrogen produced fewer emissions than fossil fuels, although often only marginally. However, when compared to other low‑emission technologies, green hydrogen often performed similarly or worse. This is because producing and transporting hydrogen still generates emissions, especially when the electricity used is not extremely low‑carbon, and because electrolysis itself is relatively inefficient. Green hydrogen only outperforms other clean options when it is produced using very low‑carbon electricity (such as wind power) and used on‑site without transport. Under these ideal conditions, it becomes the preferred option for ammonia and steel production, industrial and domestic heating, and long‑term grid balancing.

To maximise hydrogen’s climate benefit, emissions must be reduced across the entire supply chain, and hydrogen should be prioritised only in applications where it genuinely outperforms other clean alternatives. The authors propose a climate ladder to help rank and prioritise hydrogen use across sectors, guiding smarter policy and investment decisions.

Do you want to learn more about this topic?

Research and development of hydrogen carrier based solutions for hydrogen compression and storage Martin Dornheim et al. (2022)

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An unusual signal initially picked up by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors and subsequently by optical telescopes around the world may have been a “superkilonova” – that is, a kilonova that took place inside a supernova. According to a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US, the event in question happened in a galaxy 1.3 billion light years away and may have been the result of a merger between two or more neutron stars, including at least one that was less massive than our Sun. If confirmed, it would be the first superkilonova ever recorded – something that study leader Mansi Kasliwal says would advance our understanding of what happens to massive stars at the end of their lives.

A supernova is the explosion of a massive star that occurs either because the star no longer produces enough energy to prevent gravitational collapse, or because it suddenly acquires large amounts of matter from a disintegrating nearby object. Such explosions are an important source of heavy elements such as carbon and iron in the universe.

Kilonovae are slightly different. They occur when two neutron stars collide, producing heavier elements such as gold and uranium. Both types of events can be detected from the ripples they produce in spacetime – gravitational waves – and from the light they give off that propagates across the cosmos to Earth-based observers.

An unusual new kilonova candidate

The first – and so far only – confirmed observation of a kilonova came in 2017 as a result of two neutron stars colliding. This event, known as GW170817, produced gravitational waves that were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which is operated by the US National Science Foundation, and by its European partner Virgo. Several ground-based and space telescopes also observed light signals associated with GW170817, which enabled astronomers to build a clear picture of what happened.

Kasliwal and colleagues now believe they have evidence for a second kilonova with a very different cause. They say that this event, initially called ZTF 25abjmnps and then renamed AT2025ulz, could be a kilonova driven by a supernova – something that has never been observed before, although theorists predicted it was possible.

A chain of detections

The gravitational waves from AT2025ulz reached Earth on 18 August 2025 and were picked up by the LIGO detectors in Louisiana and Washington and by Virgo in Italy. Scientists there quickly alerted colleagues to the signal, which appeared to be coming from a merger between two objects, one of which was unusually small. A few hours later, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at California’s Palomar Observatory identified a rapidly fading red object 1.3 billion light-years away that appeared to be in the same location as the gravitational wave source.

Several other telescopes that were previously part of the Kasliwal-led GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) programme, including the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi and the Fraunhofer telescope at the Wendelstein Observatory in Germany, picked up the event’s trail. Their observations confirmed that the light eruption had faded fast and glowed at red light wavelengths – exactly what was observed with GW170817.

A few days later, though, something changed. AT2025ulz grew brighter, and telescopes began to pick up hydrogen lines in its light spectra – a finding that suggested it was a Type IIb (stripped-envelope core-collapse) supernova, not a kilonova.

Two possible explanations

Kasliwal, however, remained puzzled. While she agrees that AT2025ulz does not resemble GW170817, she argues that it also doesn’t look like a run-of-the-mill supernova.

In her view, that leaves two possibilities. The first involves a process called fragmentation in which a rapidly spinning star explodes in a supernova and collects a disc of material around it as it collapses. This disc material subsequently aggregates into a tiny neutron star in much the same way as planets form. The second possibility is that a rapidly spinning massive star exploded as a supernova and then split into two tiny neutron stars, both much less massive than our Sun, which later merged. In other words, a supernova may have produced twin neutron stars that then merged to make a kilonova inside it – that is, a superkilonova.

“We have never seen any hints of anything like this before,” Kasliwal says. “It is amazing to me that nature may make tiny neutron stars smaller than a solar mass and more than one neutron star may be born inside a stripped-envelope supernova.”

While Kasliwal describes the data as “tantalizing”, she acknowledges that firm evidence for a superkilonova would require nebular infrared spectroscopy from either the W M Keck Observatory or the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). On this occasion, that’s not going to be possible, as the event occurred outside JWST’s visibility window and was too far away for Keck to gather infrared spectra – though Kasliwal says the team did get “beautiful” optical spectra from Keck.

The only real way to test the superkilonova theory would be to find more events like AT2025ulz, and Kasliwal is hoping to do just that. “We will be keeping a close eye on any future events in which there are hints that the neutron star is sub-solar and look hard for a young stripped envelope supernova that could have exploded at the same time,” she tells Physics World. “Future superkilonova discoveries will open up this entirely new avenue into our understanding of what happens to massive stars.”

The study is detailed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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