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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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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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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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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People who teach physics often remove friction from calculations to make life easier for students. While that might speed up someone’s homework, it does mean that this all-important force tends to fade into the background, despite it being crucial for our daily lives. Here to bring friction centre stage is Jennifer Vail, a “tribologist” – or studier of friction – at US firm TA Instruments.

Friction: a Biography is an engaging and wide-ranging book illustrating its many manifestations in the natural world, showing how this force can be harnessed to solve practical engineering problems. Vail, who wrote the book after giving a hugely popular TED talk on friction, does a great job of connecting abstract physical ideas with familiar human experience.

I like, for example, her description of what happens when two surfaces slide over each other but the friction between them isn’t constant. As she explains, this “stick-slip” motion isn’t great if you’re trying to inject a drug into someone with a syringe. But it can be exploited to beautiful effect by violinists, creating “downright lovely” sounds (though apparently not when she’s practising on her own viola).

One of the book’s strengths is its historical context. Famous figures like Leonardo da Vinci are introduced alongside the development of their ideas, lending a human dimension to the science. The author does a great job of explaining how tribology, which comes from the Greek for “to rub”, has been shaped by careful experimentation and the application of rigorous scientific thinking to industrial problems.

After a trip to Switzerland, the physicist Frank Bowden showed we can ski because frictional heating causes a thin layer of snow to melt beneath our skis, providing liquid lubrication.

After a trip to Switzerland, for example, the Australian-born physicist Frank Bowden showed we can ski because frictional heating causes a thin layer of snow to melt beneath our skis, providing liquid lubrication. This overturned an earlier explanation associated with Osborne Reynolds (best known for the eponymous number marking the transition from laminar to turbulent flow) who’d thought that snow melts due to pressure.

Then there is the 19th-century researcher Robert Thurston, whose pendulum experiments on friction in bearings, described here in detail, guided the design of more efficient lubricated systems. As Vail explains, understanding friction is vital in the design of engines, where even small modifications – such as texturing surfaces, adding coatings, or putting nanoparticles into lubricants – can make them much more efficient and extend their useful life.

Historical anecdotes are woven throughout the book. The story of why graphite in pencils came to be called “lead” is particularly memorable. It turns out that the Romans used lead to write, so the name stuck – even after graphite became more popular because it allowed darker writing. There are also lots of excursions into the natural world: did you know that beetles have a protein in their leg joints that acts as a solid lubricant?

Smooth operator

Vail’s discussion of lubrication is clear and well-integrated with practical examples. Particularly insightful is the explanation of how hydrodynamic lubrication occurs in biological systems, such as human cartilage, where a thin fluid layer separates cartilage surfaces in joints, reducing friction and wear. As Vail makes clear, tribology is vital in physiology, for example in how contact lenses work when we blink our eyes or how food feels in our mouth when we chew.

The book also examines fluid dynamics and drag, distinguishing between viscosity as a material property and drag as a force. Vail’s discussion of plaque on the walls of our arteries is particularly compelling. If there’s not enough drag to shear off the plaque it can cause blockages and, potentially, a heart attack – showing how friction plays a role in our health.

Environmental considerations are addressed too. The author discusses, for example, the impact of polytetrafluoroethalyene (PTFE), which she calls “the most controversial solid lubricant ever”. Also known as Teflon, it is widely used in frying pans, but is synthesized using some pretty nasty carcinogenic “forever” chemicals that don’t break down in the environment. PTFE also has a shady past, being first used in the Manhattan atomic-bomb project to coat valves when separating isotopes of uranium.

Friction can improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and mitigate global warming.

On a more positive note, Vail shows how an understanding of friction can improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and mitigate global warming. The book extends further still, encompassing atmospheric, oceanic and planetary processes, as well as astronomy and cosmology. Friction is a universal physical principle, extending well beyond conventional engineering applications and broadening the scope of the book.

However, Vail’s intended audience is not always clear. Some sections read like a primer for tribologists, while others are highly speculative, such as the idea that life originated on Earth because oxidized molybdenum was delivered from Mars aboard Martian meteorites. There are also occasional errors and ambiguities, such as her discussion of the subtleties of the Earth’s tides.

Statements such as electric vehicles “consuming 106% energy” could have been more clearly explained, while her market estimate for anti-friction coatings of just over $1.5m by 2028 is almost certainly too low by three orders of magnitude. While these issues do not undermine the book’s scientific substance, they may distract careful readers, and the rapid movement between topics occasionally disrupts the narrative flow.

Overall, though, Vail does a good job of balancing technical exposition with anecdote and gentle humour. Friction might seem an unpromising subject for a book, but non-expert readers will find much to surprise and engage them. Despite its flaws, I would recommend it as an illuminating, if imperfect, celebration of friction and its central role in science and engineering.

• 2026 Harvard University Press 248pp £23.95hb

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A passive vacuum pump that uses 3D-printed surfaces to better absorb gas molecules has been unveiled by researchers in the UK. It removes gas nearly four-times faster than a similar system with a flat surface. The pump could make it easier to design quantum sensors that require high-vacuum conditions.

Cold atoms are at the heart of many quantum-sensing technologies. For example, atom interferometry is used to measure tiny deviations in local gravity – which can be used to map underground infrastructure.

Cold-atom systems must operate at high vacuum and most vacuum pumps are mechanical or electrical in nature. The size of these active pumps and the energy that they consume makes it difficult to operate sensors in remote or mobile scenarios – particularly on satellites. As a result, researchers who are designing quantum sensors are keen on reducing or even eliminating their reliance on active pumps.

One solution is the use of passive pumps, which have surfaces made from materials that absorb large numbers of gas molecules. Now, Lucia Hackermueller and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, Torr Scientific and Metamorphic Additive Manufacturing have created two new textured surfaces that accelerate passive pumping.

Bounce optimization

One of their surfaces is a hexagonal array of tapered pockets that resembles a honeycomb. The other surface is a hexagonal array of conical protrusions.  They chose their designs after doing Monte Carlo computer simulations of how gas molecules behave near textured surfaces. When a molecule collides with a flat surface it will either be absorbed or bounce off the surface and escape. However, if the surface has 3D structures on it, a molecule may ricochet back and forth several times between structures before it escapes. Each collision increases the chance that the molecule will be absorbed by the surface. So, the researchers sought to optimize the number of bounces in their simulations.

They then used the 3D printing of a titanium alloy to create the two promising designs on hockey-puck sized flanges that could be installed in a conventional high-vacuum system (see figure). The final step in the fabrication process was to coat the surfaces with a nonevaporable getter, which is a material designed specifically to absorb gas molecules in a vacuum system.

The team found that their hexagonal-pocket design pumped gas 3.8 times faster than a flat surface – and the hexagonal-protrusion design achieved a performance that is nearly as good.

Team member Ben Hopton at the University of Nottingham says, “What’s exciting about this work is that relatively simple surface engineering can have a surprisingly large effect. By shifting some of the burden from active pumping to passive surface-based pumping, this approach has the potential to significantly reduce, or even remove, the need for bulky pumps in some vacuum systems, allowing quantum technologies to be far more portable.”

The research is described in Physical Review Applied.

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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 × 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.”

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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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I hear it all the time: physics students have only the haziest idea of what they can do with a physics degree. Staying in academia is the obvious option but they’re often not sure what else is out there. With hefty student debts to pay off, getting a well-paid job in finance seems to top many physicists’ wish lists these days. But there are lots of other options, from healthcare, green energy and computing to education, aviation and construction.

Some of the many things you can do with a physics degree are covered in the latest edition of Physics World Careers, which is out now. This bumper, 96-page digital guide contains profiles of physicists working across a variety of fields, along with career-development advice and a directory of employers looking to hire physicists. Now in its 10th year, the guide has become an indispensable source of careers information for physicists setting out in the world of work.

The 2026 edition of Physics World Careers includes, for example, an article featuring two leaders from the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ, a spotlight on the many jobs in nuclear energy, as well as careers tips from a recent Physics World Live panel. Remember that if you’re ready to start your job search, you can find all the latest opportunities on the Physics World Jobs portal, which has vacancies in physics and engineering for people at all career stages.

A great example of where a physics degree can take you is Rob Farr, a theoretical physicist who’s spent more than 25 years in the food industry. He’s a wonderful illustration of a physicist doing something you might not expect, in his case going from the chilly depths of ice cream science to the dark arts of coffee production and brewing. But that’s the beauty of a physics degree – it provides skills, knowledge and insight that can be applied to very different areas.

• Read the latest edition of Physics World Careers by clicking this link.

 

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The UNESCO International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ) ends on an exotic flourish this month, with the official closing ceremony – which will be live-streamed from Accra, Ghana – looking back on what’s been a global celebration “observed through activities at all levels aimed at increasing public awareness of the importance of quantum science and applications”.

The timing of IYQ has proved apposite, mirroring as it does a notable inflection point within the quantum technology sector. Advances in fundamental quantum science and applied R&D are accelerating on a global scale, harnessing the exotic properties of quantum mechanics – entanglement, tunnelling, superposition and the like – to underpin practical applications in quantum computing and quantum communications.

Quantum metrology, meanwhile, has progressed from its roots in fundamental physics to become a cornerstone of technology innovation, yielding breakthroughs in fields such as precision timing, navigation, cryptography and advanced imaging – and that’s just for starters.

Collaborate to accelerate

Notwithstanding all this forward motion, IYQ has also highlighted significant challenges when it comes to scaling quantum systems, achieving fault tolerance and ensuring reproducible performance. Enter NMI-Q, an international initiative that leverages the combined expertise of the world’s leading National Metrology Institutes (NMIs) – from the G7 countries and Australia – to accelerate the adoption of foundational hardware and software technologies for quantum computing systems and the quantum internet.

The NMI-Q partnership was officially launched in November last year at the IYQ conference “Quantum Metrology: From Foundations to the Future”, an event hosted by NPL. Together, the respective NMIs will 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 technologies.

“NMI-Q has an ambitious and broad-scope brief, but it’s very much a joined-up effort when it comes to the division of labour,” says Cyrus Larijani, NPL’s head of quantum programme. The rationale being that no one country can do it all when it comes to the performance metrics, benchmarks and standards needed to take quantum breakthroughs out of the laboratory and into the commercial mainstream.

Post-launch, NMI-Q has received a collective “uptick” from the quantum community, with the establishment of internationally recognized standards and trusted benchmarks seen as core building blocks for the at-scale uptake and interoperability of quantum technologies. “What’s more,” adds Larijani, “there’s a clear consensus for collaboration over competition [between the NMIs], supported by shared development roadmaps and open-access platforms to avoid fragmentation and geopolitical barriers.”

Follow the money

In terms of technology push, the scale of investment – both public and private sector – in all things quantum means that the nascent supply chain is evolving at pace, linking component manufacturers, subsystem developers and full-stack quantum computing companies. That’s reinforced by plenty of downstream pull: all sorts of industries – from finance to healthcare, telecoms to energy generation – are seeking to understand the commercial upsides of quantum technologies, but don’t yet have the necessary domain knowledge and skill sets to take full advantage of the opportunities.

Given that context, the onus is on NMI-Q to pool its world-leading expertise in quantum metrology to inform evidence-based decision-making among key stakeholders in the “quantum ecosystem”: investors, policy-makers, manufacturers and, ultimately, the end-users of quantum applications. “Our task is to make sure that quantum technologies are built on reliable, scalable and interoperable foundations,” notes Larijani. “That’s the crux of where we’re going with NMI-Q.”

Right now, NPL and its partner NMIs are busy shaping NMI-Q’s work programme and deliverables for 2026 and beyond, with the benchmarking of quantum computers very much front-and-centre. Their challenge lies in the diversity of quantum hardware platforms in the mix; also the emergence of two different approaches to quantum computing – one being a gate-based framework for universal quantum computation, the other an analogue approach tailored to outperforming classical computers on specific tasks.

“In this start-up phase, it’s all about bringing everyone together to define and assign the granular NMI-Q work packages and associated timelines,” says Larijani. Operational and strategic alignment is also mandatory across the member NMIs, so that each laboratory (and its parent government) is fully on board with the collaboration’s desired outcomes. “It’s going very well so far in terms of aligning members’ national interests versus NMI-Q’s direction of travel,” adds Larijani. “This emphasis on ‘science diplomacy’, if you like, will remain crucial to our success.”

Long term, NMI-Q’s development of widely applicable performance metrics, benchmarks and standards will, it is hoped, enable the quantum technology industry to achieve critical mass on the supply side, with those economies of scale driving down prices and increasing demand.

“Ultimately, though, we want NMI-Q to blossom into something much bigger than the individual NMIs, spanning out to engage the supply chains of member countries,” says Larijani. “It’s really important for NPL and the NMI-Q partners to help quantum companies scale their offerings, advance their technology readiness level and, sooner than later, get innovative products and services into the market.”

That systematic support for innovation and technology translation is evident on the domestic front as well. The UK Quantum Standards Network Pilot – which is being led by NPL – brings together representatives from industry (developers and end-users), academia and government to work on all aspects of standards development and ensure that UK quantum technology companies have access to global supply chains and markets.

Quantum impact

So what does success look like for Larijani in 2026? “We’re really motivated to work with as many quantum companies as we can – to help these organizations launch new quantum products and applications,” he explains. Another aspiration is to encourage industry partners to co-locate their R&D and innovation activities within NPL’s Institute for Quantum Standards and Technology.

“There are moves to establish a quantum technology cluster at NPL to enable UK and overseas companies to access our specialist know-how and unique measurement capability,” Larijani concludes. “Equally, as a centre-of-excellence in quantum science, we can help to scale the UK quantum workforce as well as encourage our own spin-out ventures in quantum metrology.”

Further reading

• Performance metrics and benchmarks point the way to practical quantum advantage
• Why quantum metrology is the driving force for best practice in quantum standardization
• Podcast – Quantum metrology at NPL: we explore the challenges and opportunities

NPL retains copyright on this article.

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Classical mechanics describes our everyday world of macroscopic objects very well. Quantum mechanics is similarly good at describing physics on the atomic scale. The boundary between these two regimes, however, is still poorly understood. Where, exactly, does the quantum world stop and the classical world begin?

Researchers in Austria and Germany have now pushed the line further towards the macroscopic regime by showing that metal nanoparticles made up of thousands of atoms clustered together continue to obey the rules of quantum mechanics in a double-slit-type experiment. At over 170 000 atomic mass units, these nanoparticles are heavier than some viroids and proteins – a fact that study leader Sebastian Pedalino, a PhD student at the University of Vienna, says demonstrates that quantum mechanics remains valid at this scale and alternative models are not required.

Multiscale cluster interference

According to the rules of quantum mechanics, even large objects behave as delocalized waves. However, we do not observe this behaviour in our daily lives because the characteristic length over which this behaviour extends – the de Broglie wavelength λ_dB = h/mv, where h is Planck’s constant, m is the object’s mass and v is its velocity – is generally much smaller than the object itself.

In the new work, a team led by Vienna’s Markus Arndt and Stefan Gerlich, in collaboration with Klaus Hornberger at the University of Duisburg-Essen, created clusters of sodium atoms in a helium-argon mixture at 77 K in an ultrahigh vacuum. The clusters each contained between 5000 and 1000 atoms and travelled at velocities of around 160 m s⁻¹, giving them de Broglie wavelengths between 10‒22 femtometres (1 fm = 10^-12 m).

To observe matter-wave interference in objects with such ultra-short de Broglie wavelengths, the team used an interferometer containing three diffraction gratings constructed with deep ultraviolet laser beams in a so-called Talbot–Lau configuration. The first grating channels the clusters through narrow gaps, from which their wave function expands. This wave is then modulated by the second grating, resulting in interference that produces a measurable striped pattern at the third grating.

This result implies that the clusters’ location is not fixed as it propagates through the apparatus. Instead, its wave function is spread over a span dozens of times larger than an individual cluster, meaning that it is in a superposition of locations rather than occupying a fixed position in space. This is known as a Schrödinger cat state, in reference to the famous thought experiment by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in which he imagined a cat sitting in a sealed box to be both dead and alive at once.

Pushing the boundaries for quantum experiments

The Vienna-Duisburg-Essen researchers characterized their experiment by calculating a quantity known as macroscopicity that combines the duration of the quantum state (its coherence time), the mass of the object in that state and the degree of separation between states. In this work, which they detail in Nature, the macroscopicity reached a value of 15.5 – an order of magnitude higher than the best known previous reported measurement of this kind.

Arndt explains that this milestone was reached thanks to a long-term research programme that aims to push quantum experiments to ever higher masses and complexity. “The motivation is simply that we do not yet know if quantum mechanics is the ultimate theory or if it requires any modification at some mass limit,” he tells Physics World. While several speculative theories predict some degree of modification, he says, “as experimentalists our task is to be agnostic and see what happens”.

Arndt notes that the team’s machine is very sensitive to small forces, which can generate notable deflections of the interference fringes. In the future, he thinks this effect could be exploited to characterize the properties of materials. In the longer term, this force-sensing capability could even be used to search for new particles.

Interpretations and adventures

While Arndt says he is “impressed” that these mesoscopic objects – which are in principle easy to see and even to localize under a scattering microscope – can be delocalized on a scale more than 10 times their size if they are isolated and non-interacting, he is not entirely surprised. The challenge, he says, lies in understanding what it means. “The interpretation of this phenomenon, the duality between this delocalization and the apparently local nature in the act of measurement, is still an open conundrum,” he says.

Looking ahead, the researchers say they would now like to extend their research to higher mass objects, longer coherence times, higher force sensitivity and different materials, including nanobiological materials as well as other metals and dielectrics. “We still have a lot of work to do on sources, beam splitters, detectors, vibration isolation and cooling,” says Arndt. “This is a big experimental adventure for us.”

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Using artificial intelligence (AI) increases scientists’ productivity and impact but collectively leads to a shrinking of research focus. That is according to an analysis of more than 41 million research papers by scientist in China and the US, which finds that scientists who produce AI-augmented research also progress faster in their careers than their colleagues who do not (Nature 649 1237).

The study was carried out by James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues who analysed 41.3 million papers listed in the OpenAlex dataset published between 1980 and 2025. They looked at papers in physics and five other disciplines – biology, chemistry, geology, materials science and medicine.

Using an AI language model to identify AI-assisted work, the team picked out almost 310 000 AI-augmented papers from the dataset. They found that AI-supported publications receive more citations than no-AI-assisted papers, while also being more impactful across multiple indicators and having a higher prevalence in high-impact journals.

Individual researchers who adopt AI publish, on average, three times as many papers and get almost five times as many citations as those not using AI. In physics, researchers who use AI tools garner 183 citations every year, on average, while those who do not use AI get only 51 annually.

AI also boosts career trajectories. Based on an analysis of more than two million scientists in the dataset, the study finds that junior researchers who adopt AI are more likely to become established scientists. They also gain project leadership roles almost one-and-a-half years earlier, on average, than those who do not use AI.

Fundamental questions

But when the researchers examined the knowledge spread of a random sample of 10 000 papers, half of which used AI, they found that AI-produced work shrinks the range of topics covered by almost 5%. The finding is consistent across all six disciplines. Furthermore, AI papers are more clustered than non-AI papers, suggesting a tendency to concentrate on specific problems.

AI tools, in other words, appear to funnel research towards areas rich in data and help to automate established fields rather than exploring new topics. Evans and colleagues think this AI-induced convergence could drive science away from foundational questions and towards data-rich operational topics.

AI could, however, help combat this trend. “We need to reimagine AI systems that expand not only cognitive capacity but also sensory and experimental capacity,” they say. “[This could] enable and incentivize scientists to search, select and gather new types of data from previously inaccessible domains rather than merely optimizing analysis of standing data.”

Meanwhile, a new report by the AI company OpenAI has found that messages on advanced topics in science and mathematics on ChatGPT over the last year have grown by nearly 50%, to almost 8.4 million per week. The firm says its generative AI chatbot is being used to advance research across scientific fields from experiment planning and literature synthesis to mathematical reasoning and data analysis.

The post Using AI boosts scientific productivity and career prospects, finds study appeared first on Physics World.

Hints of non-gravitational interactions between dark matter and “relic” neutrinos in the early universe have emerged in a study of astronomical data from different periods of cosmic history. The study was carried out by cosmologists in Poland, the UK and China, and team leader Sebastian Trojanowski of Poland’s NCBJ and NCAC PAS notes that future telescope observations could verify or disprove these hints of a deep connection between dark matter and neutrinos.

Dark matter and neutrinos play major roles in the evolution of cosmic structures, but they are among the universe’s least-understood components. Dark matter is thought to make up over 25% of the universe’s mass, but it has never been detected directly; instead, its existence is inferred from its gravitational interactions. Neutrinos, for their part, are fundamental subatomic particles that have a very low mass and interact only rarely with normal matter.

Analysing data from different epochs

According to the standard (ΛCDM) model of cosmology, dark matter and neutrinos do not interact with each other. The work of Trojanowski and colleagues challenges this model by proposing that dark matter and neutrinos may have interacted in the past, when the universe was younger and contained many more neutrinos than it does today.

This proposal, they say, was partly inspired by a longstanding cosmic conundrum. Measurements of the early universe suggest that structures such as galaxies should have grown more rapidly than ΛCDM predicts. At the same time, observations of today’s universe indicate that matter is slightly less densely packed than expected. This suggests a slight mismatch between early and late measurements.

To explore the impact that dark matter-neutrino interactions (νDM) would have on this mismatch, a team led by Trojanowski’s colleague Lei Zu analysed data from different epochs of the universe’s evolution. Data from the young (high redshift) universe came from two instruments – the ground-based Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the space-based Planck Telescope, which the European Space Agency operated from 2009 to 2013 – that were designed to study the afterglow of the Big Bang, which is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Data from the older (low-redshift, or z< 3.5) universe, meanwhile, came from a variety of sources, including galaxy maps from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and weak gravitational lensing data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) conducted with the Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M Blanco Telescope in Chile.

“New insight into how structure formed in the universe”

Drawing on these data, the team calculated that an interaction strength u ≈10⁻⁴ between dark matter and neutrinos would be enough to resolve the discrepancy. The statistical significance of this result is nearly 3σ, which team member Sming Tsai Yue-Lin of the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China says was “largely achieved by incorporating the high-precision weak lensing data from the DES with the weak lensing component”.​

While this is not high enough to definitively disprove the ΛCDM model, the researchers say it does show that the model is incomplete and requires further investigation. “Our study shows that interactions between dark matter and neutrinos could help explain this difference, offering new insight into how structure formed in the universe,” explains team member Eleonora Di Valentino, a senior research fellow at Sheffield University, UK.

Trojanowski adds that the ΛCDM has been under growing pressure in recent years, while the Standard Model of particle physics cannot explain the nature of dark matter. “These two theories need to be extended to resolve these problems and studying dark matter-neutrino interactions are a promising way to achieve this goal,” he says.

The team’s result, he continues, adds to the “massive amount of data” suggesting that we are reaching the limits of the standard cosmological model and may be at the dawn of understanding physics beyond it. “We illustrate that we likely need to bridge cosmological data and fundamental particle physics to describe the universe across different scales and so resolve current anomalies,” he says.

Two worlds

One of the challenges of doing this, Trojanowski adds, is that the two fields involved – cosmological data analysis and theoretical astroparticle physics – are very different. “Each field has its own approach to problem-solving and even its own jargon,” he says. “Fortunately, we had a great team and working together was really fun.”

The researchers say that data from future telescope observations, such as those from the Vera C Rubin Observatory (formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST) and the China Space Station Telescope (CSST), could place more stringent tests on their hypothesis. Data from CMB experiments and weak lensing surveys, which map the distribution of mass in the universe by analysing how distant galaxies distort light, could also come in useful.

They detail their present research in Nature Astronomy.

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Quantum entanglement is a uniquely quantum link between particles that makes their properties inseparable. It underlies the power of many quantum technologies from secure communication to quantum computing, by enabling correlations impossible in classical physics.

Entanglement nevertheless remains poorly understood and is therefore the subject of a lot of research, both in the fields of quantum technologies as well as fundamental physics.

In this context, the idea of separability refers to a composite system that can be written as a simple product (or mixture of products) of the states of its individual parts. This implies there is no entanglement between them and to create entanglement, a global transformation is needed.

A system that remains completely free of entanglement, even after any possible global invertible transformation is applied, is called absolutely separable.  In other words, it can never become entangled under the action of quantum gates.

Necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure separability exist only in the simplest cases or for highly restricted families of states. In fact, entanglement verification and quantification is known to be generically an NP-hard problem.

Recent research published by a team of researchers from Spain and Poland has tackled this problem head-on. By introducing new analytical tools such as linear maps and their inverses, they were able to identify when a quantum state is guaranteed to be absolutely separable.

These tools work in any number of dimensions and allow the authors to pinpoint specific states that are on the border of being absolutely separable or not (mathematically speaking, ones that lie on the boundary of the set). They also show how different criteria for absolute separability, which may not always agree with each other, can be combined and refined using convex geometry optimisation.

Being able to more easily and accurately determine whether a quantum state is absolutely separable will be invaluable in quantum computation and communication.

The team’s results for multipartite systems (systems with more than two parts) also reveal how little we currently understand about the entanglement properties of mixed, noisy states. This knowledge gap suggests that much more research is needed in this area.

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When we interact with everyday objects, we take for granted that physical systems naturally settle into stable, predictable states. A cup of coffee cools down. A playground swing slows down after being pushed.  Quantum systems, however, behave very differently.

These systems can exist in multiple states at once, and their evolution is governed by probabilities rather than certainties. Nevertheless, even these strange systems do eventually relax and settle down, losing information about their earlier state. The speed at which this happens is called the relaxation rate.

Relaxation rates tell us how fast a quantum system forgets its past, how quickly it thermalises, reaches equilibrium, decoheres, or dissipates energy. These rates are important not just for theorists but also for experimentalists, who can measure them directly in the lab.

Recently, researchers discovered that these rates obey a surprisingly universal rule. For a broad class of quantum processes (those described by what physicists call Markovian semigroups) the fastest possible relaxation rate cannot exceed a certain limit. Specifically, it must be no larger than the sum of all relaxation rates divided by the system’s dimension. This constraint, originally a conjecture, was first proven using tools from classical mathematics known as Lyapunov theory.

In a new paper published recently, an international team of researchers provided a new, more direct algebraic proof of this universal bound. There are a number of advantages of the new proof compared to the older one, and it can be generalised more easily, but that’s not all.

The very surprising outcome of their work is that the rule doesn’t require complete positivity. Instead, a weaker condition – two‑positivity is enough. The distinction between these two requirements is crucial.

Essentially, both are measures of how well-behaved a quantum system is, how it is protected from providing nonsensical results. The difference is that two-positivity is slightly less stringent but far more general, and hence very useful for many real-world applications.

The fact that the new proof only requires two-positivity means that it this new universal relaxation rate can actually be applied to a lot more scenarios.

What’s more, even when weakened even further, a slightly softer version of the universal constraint still holds. This shows that the structure behind these bounds is richer and more subtle than previously understood.

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Loss of a limb can significantly impact a person’s independence and quality-of-life, with arm amputations particularly impeding routine daily activities. Prosthetic limbs can restore some of the lost function, but often rely on surface electrodes with low signal quality. A research team at the University of Michigan has now shown that implanted electrodes could provide more accurate and reliable control of hand and wrist prostheses.

Today, most upper-limb prostheses are controlled using surface electrodes placed on the skin to detect electrical activity from underlying muscles. The recorded electromyography (EMG) signals are then used to classify different finger and wrist movements. Under real-world conditions, however, these signals can be impaired by inconsistent electrode positioning, changes in limb volume, exposure to sweat and artefacts from user movements.

Implanted electrodes, tiny contacts that are surgically sutured into muscles, could do a better job. By targeting muscles deeper in the arm, they offer higher signal-to-noise ratios and less susceptibility to daily variations. And although amputation can eliminate many of the muscles that control hand functions, techniques such as regenerative peripheral nerve interface (RPNI) surgery – in which muscle tissue is grafted to nerves in the residual limb – enable electrodes to target missing muscles and record relevant signals for prosthetic control.

Senior author Cynthia Chestek points out that such RPNI grafts are also beneficial for the nerve itself. “They provide a target for nerve endings that prevent the formation of painful neuromas, and that may in turn help reduce phantom limb pain,” she explains “In future, it would also be possible to place electrodes and a wireless transmitter during that same surgery, such that no additional surgeries are required other than the original amputation.”

In their latest work, reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering, Chestek and colleagues investigated whether implanted electrodes could provide stable and high-quality signals for  controlling prosthetic hand and wrist function.

Performance comparisons

The study involved two individuals with forearm amputations and EMG electrodes implanted into RPNIs and muscles in their residual limb. The subjects performed various experiments, during which the team recorded EMG signals from the implanted electrodes plus dry-domed and gelled (used to improve contact with the skin) surface electrodes.

In one experiment, participants were tasked with controlling a virtual hand and wrist in real time by mimicking movements (various grips) on a screen. The researchers used the recorded EMG signals to train linear discriminant analysis classifiers to distinguish the cued grips, training separate classifiers for each electrode type.

They then evaluated the performance of these grip classifiers during a posture classification experiment, in which the subjects actively controlled hand or wrist movements of a virtual hand. Participants achieved faster, more accurate and more reliable control using the implanted electrodes than the surface electrodes.

With participants sitting and keeping their arm still, the implanted electrodes achieved average per-bin accuracies (the percentage of correctly classified time bins) of 82.1% and 91.2% for subjects 1 and 2, respectively. The surface electrodes performed worse, with accuracies of 77.1% and 81.3% for gelled electrodes, and 58.2% and 67.1% for dry-domed electrodes, for subjects 1 and 2, respectively.

The researchers repeated this experiment with the subjects standing and moving their arm to mimic daily activities. Adding movement reduced the classification accuracy in all cases, but affected the implanted electrodes to a far smaller degree. The control success rate (the ability to hold a grip for at least 1 s, within 3 s of seeing a movement cue) also diminished between still and moving conditions, but again, the implanted electrodes experienced smaller decreases.

Overall, the performance of online classifiers using implanted electrodes was only slightly affected by arm movements, while classifiers trained on surface electrodes became unstable. Investigating the reasons underlying this difference revealed that implanted electrodes exhibited higher EMG signal amplitudes, lower cross-correlation between channels, and smaller signal deviations between still and moving conditions.

The Coffee Task

To examine a real-world scenario, subject 1 completed the “Coffee Task”, which involves performing the various grips and movements required to: place a cup into a coffee machine; place a coffee pod into the machine; push the start button; move the filled cup onto a table; and open a sugar packet and pour it into the cup.

The subject performed the task using an iLimb Quantum myoelectric prosthetic hand controlled by either implanted or dry surface electrodes, with and without control of wrist rotation. The participant performed the task faster using implanted electrodes, successfully completing the task on all three attempts. For surface-based control, they reached the maximum time limit of 150 s in two out of three attempts.

Although gelled electrodes are the gold standard for surface EMG, they cannot be used whilst wearing a standard prosthetic socket. “With the Coffee Task, use of the physical prosthetic  hand is needed, so this was only performed with dry-domed surface electrodes and implanted electrodes,” explains first author Dylan Wallace.

The researchers also assessed whether simultaneous wrist and hand control can reduce compensatory body movements (measured using reflective markers on the subject’s torso), compared with hand control alone. Without wrist rotation, the subject had to lean their entire upper body to complete the pouring task. With wrist rotation enabled, this lean was greatly reduced.

This finding emphasizes how wrist control provides significant functional benefit for prosthesis users during daily activities. Chestek notes that in a previous study where participants wore a prosthesis without an active wrist, “almost everything we asked them to do required large body movements”.

“Fortunately, the implantable electrodes provide highly specific and high-amplitude signals, such that we were able to add that wrist movement without losing the ability to classify multiple different grasps,” she explains. “The next step would be to pursue continuous, rather than discrete, movement for all of the individual joints of the hand –  though that will not happen quickly.”

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Astronomers have created the most detailed map to date of the vast structures of dark matter that appear to permeate the universe. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team, led by Diana Scognamiglio at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used gravitational lensing to map the dark matter filaments and clusters with unprecedented resolution. As a result, physicists have new and robust data to test theories of dark matter.

Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that appears to account for about 85% of the mass in universe – yet it has never been observed directly. Dark matter is invoked by physicists to explain the dynamics and evolution of large scale structures in the universe. This includes the gravitational formation of galaxy clusters and the cosmic filaments connecting them over 100-million-light–year distances.

Light from very distant objects beyond these structures is deflected by the gravitational tug of dark matter within the clusters and filaments. This can be observed on Earth as the gravitational lensing of these distant objects. This distorts images of the distant objects and affects their observed brightness. These effects can be used to determine the dark-matter content of the clusters and filaments.

In 2007, the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) used the Hubble Space Telescope to create a map of cosmic filaments in an area of the sky about nine times larger than that occupied by the Moon.

“The COSMOS field was published by Richard Massey and my advisor, Jason Rhodes,” Scognamiglio recounts. “It has a special place in the history of dark-matter mapping, with the first wide-area map of space-based weak lensing mass.”

However, Hubble’s limited resolution meant that many smaller-scale features remained invisible in COSMOS. In a new survey called COSMOS-Web, Scognamiglio’s team harnessed the vastly improved imaging capabilities of the JWST, which offers over twice the resolution of its predecessor.

Sharp and sensitive

“We used JWST’s exceptional sharpness and sensitivity to measure the shapes of many more faint, distant galaxies in the COSMOS-Web field – the central part of the original COSMOS field,” Scognamiglio describes. “This allowed us to push weak gravitational lensing into a new regime, producing a much sharper and more detailed mass map over a contiguous area.”

With these improvements, the team could measure the shapes of 129 galaxies per square arcminute in area of sky the size of 2.5 full moons. With thorough mathematical analysis, they could then identify which of these galaxies had been distorted by dark-matter lensing.

“The map revealed fine structure in the cosmic web, including filaments and mass concentrations that were not visible in previous space-based maps,” Scognamiglio says.

Peak star formation

The map allowed the team to identify lensing structures out to distances of roughly 5 billion light–years, corresponding to the universe’s peak era of star formation. Beyond this point, galaxies became too sparse and dim for their shapes to be measured reliably, placing a new limit on the COSMOS-Web map’s resolution.

With this unprecedented resolution, the team could also identify features as small as the dark matter halos encircling small clusters of galaxies, which were invisible in the original COSMOS survey. The astronomers hope their result will set a new, higher-resolution benchmark for future studies using JWST’s observations to probe the elusive nature of dark matter, and its intrinsic connection with the formation and evolution of the universe’s largest structures.

“It also sets the stage for current and future missions like ESA’s Euclid and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will extend similar dark matter mapping techniques to much larger areas of the sky,” Scognamiglio says.

The observations are described in Nature Astronomy.

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Some 20 papers from researchers based in North America have been recognized with a Top Cited Paper award for 2025 from IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World.

The prize is given to corresponding authors who have papers published in both IOP Publishing and its partners’ journals from 2022 to 2024 that are in the top 1% of the most cited papers.

Meanwhile, 29 papers from India have been recognized with a Top Cited Paper award for 2025.

Below, some of the winners of the 2025 top-cited paper award from India and North America outline their tips for early-career researchers who are looking to boost the impact of their work.

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Shikhar Mittal from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai: Early-career researchers, especially PhD students, often underestimate the importance of presentation and visibility when it comes to their work. While doing high-quality research is, of course, essential, it is equally important to write your paper clearly and professionally. Even the tiniest of details, such as consistent scientific notation, clean figures, correct punctuation and avoiding typos can make a big difference. A paper full of careless errors may not be taken seriously, even if it contains strong scientific results.

Another crucial aspect is visibility. It is important to actively advertise your research by presenting your work at conferences and reaching out to researchers who are working on related topics. If someone misses citing your relevant work, a polite message can often lead to recognition and even collaboration. Being proactive in how you communicate and share your research can significantly improve its impact.

Sandip Mondal from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay: Don’t try to solve everything at once. Pick a focused, well-motivated question and go deep into it. It’s tempting to jump on “hot topics”, but the work that lasts – and gets cited – is methodologically sound, reproducible and well-characterized. Even incremental advances, if rigorously done, can be very impactful.

Another tip is to work with people who bring complementary skills — whether in theory, device fabrication or characterization. Collaboration isn’t just about co-authors; it’s about deepening the quality of your work. And once your paper is published, your job isn’t done. Promote it as visibility breeds engagement, which leads to impact.

Sarika Jalan from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore: Try to go in-depth into the problem you are working on. Publications alone cannot give visibility, its understanding and creativity that will matter in the long run.

Marcia Rieke from the University of Arizona: Write clearly and concisely. I would also suggest being careful with your choice of journal – high-impact-factor journals can be great but may lead to protracted refereeing while other journals are very reputable and sometimes have faster publication rates.

Dan Scolnic from Duke University: At some point there needs to be a transition from thinking about “number of papers” to “number of citations” instead. Graduate students typically talk about writing as many papers as possible – that’s the metric. But at some point scientists start getting judged on the impact of their papers, which is most easily understood with citations. I’m not saying one should e-mail anyone with a paper to cite them, but rather, to think about what one wants to put time in to work on. One should say “I’d like to work on this because I think it can have a big impact”.

P Veeresha from CHRIST University in Bangalore: Build a strong foundation in the fundamentals and always think critically about what society truly needs. Also focus on how your research can be different, novel, and practically useful. It’s important to present your work in a simple and clear way so that it connects with both the academic community and real-world applications.

Parasuraman Swaminathan from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras: Thorough research is critical for good quality research, be bold and try to push the boundaries of your chosen topic.

Arnab Pal from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai: Focus on asking meaningful, well-motivated questions rather than just solving technically difficult problems. Write clearly and communicate your ideas with simplicity and purpose. Engage with the research community early through talks, preprints and collaborations. Above all, be patient and consistent; impactful work often takes time to be recognized.

Steven Finkelstein from the University of Texas at Austin: Work on topics that both you think are interesting, and that others find interesting, and above all work with people who you trust.

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The facts seem simple enough. In 1957 Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee won the Nobel Prize for Physics “for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles”. The idea that parity is violated shocked physicists, who had previously assumed that every process in nature remains the same if you reverse all three spatial co-ordinates.

Thanks to the work of Lee and Yang, who were Chinese-American theoretical physicists, it now appeared that this fundamental physics concept wasn’t true (see box below). As Yang once told Physics World columnist and historian of science Robert Crease, the discovery of parity violation was like having the lights switched off and being so confused that you weren’t sure you’d be in the same room when they came back on.

But one controversy has always surrounded the prize.

Lee and Yang published their findings in a paper in October 1956 (Phys. Rev. 1 254), meaning that their Nobel prize was one of the rare occasions that satisfied Alfred Nobel’s will, which says the award should go to work done “during the preceding year”. However, the first verification of parity violation was published in February 1957 (Phys. Rev. 105 1413) by a team of experimental physicists led by Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia University, where Lee was also based. (Yang was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at the time.)

Surely Wu, an eminent experimentalist (see box below “Chien-Shiung Wu: a brief history”), deserved a share of the prize for contributing to such an fundamental discovery? In her paper, entitled “Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay”, Wu says she had “inspiring discussions” with Lee and Yang. Was gender bias at play, did her paper miss the deadline, or was she simply never nominated?

Back then, the Nobel statutes stipulated that all details about who had been nominated for a Nobel prize – and why the winners were chosen by the Nobel committee – were to be kept secret forever. Later, in 1974, the rules were changed, allowing the archives to be opened 50 years after an award had been made. So why did the mystery not become clear in 2007, half a century after the 1957 prize?

The reason is that there is a secondary criterion for prizes awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – in physics and chemistry – which is that the archive must stay shut for as long as a laureate is still alive. Lee and Yang were in their early 30s when they were awarded the prize and both went on to live very long lives. Lee died on 24 August 2024 aged 97 and it was not until the death of Yang on 18 October 2025 at 103 that the chance to solve the mystery finally arose.

Entering the archives

As two physicists based in Stockholm with a keen interest in the history of science, we had already examined the case of Lise Meitner, another female physicist who never won a Nobel prize – in her case for fission. We’d published our findings about Meitner in the December 2023 issue of Fysikaktuellt – the journal of the Swedish Physical Society. So after Yang died, we asked the Center for History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences if we could look at the 1957 archives.

A previous article in Physics World from 2012 by Magdolna Hargittai, who had spoken to Anders Bárány, former secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, seemed to suggest that Wu wasn’t awarded the 1957 prize because her Physical Review paper had been published in February of that year. This was after the January cut-off and therefore too late to be considered on that occasion (although the trio could have been awarded a joint prize in a subsequent year).

After receiving permission to access the archives, we went to the centre on Thursday 13 November 2025, where – with great excitement – we finally got our hands on the thick, black, hard-bound book containing information about the 1957 Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. About 500 pages long, the book revealed that there were a total of 58 nominations for the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics – but none at all for Wu that year. As we shall go on to explain, she did, however, receive a total of 23 nominations over the next 16 years.

Lee and Yang, we discovered, received just a single nomination for the 1957 prize, submitted by John Simpson, an experimental physicist at the University of Chicago in the US. His nomination reached the Nobel Committee on 29 January 1957, just before the deadline of 31 January. Simpson clearly had a lot of clout with the committee, which commissioned two reports from its members – both Swedish physicists – based on his recommendation. One was by Oskar Klein on the theoretical aspects of the prize and the other by Erik Hulthén on the experimental side of things.

Report revelations

Klein devotes about half of his four-page report to the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who – we discovered – received seven separate nominations for the 1957 prize. In his opening remarks, Klein notes that Wigner’s work on symmetry principles in physics, first published in 1927, had gained renewed relevance in light of recent experiments by Wu, Leon Lederman and others. According to Klein, these experiments cast a new light on the fundamental symmetry principles of physics.

Klein then discusses three important papers by Wigner and concludes that he, more than any other physicist, established the conceptual background on symmetry principles that enabled Lee and Yang to clarify the possibilities of experimentally testing parity non-conservation. Klein also analyses Lee and Yang’s award-winning Physical Review paper in some detail and briefly mentions subsequent articles of theirs as well as papers by two future Nobel laureates – Lev Landau and Abdus Salam.

Klein does not end his report with an explicit recommendation, but identifies Lee, Yang and Wigner as having made the most important contributions. It is noteworthy that every physicist mentioned in Klein’s report – apart from Wu – eventually went on to receive a Nobel Prize for Physics. Wigner did not have to wait long, winning the 1963 prize together with Maria Goeppert Mayer and Hans Jensen, who had also been nominated in 1957.

As for Hulthén’s experimental report, it acknowledges that Wu’s experiment started after early discussions with Lee and Yang. In fact, Lee had consulted Wu at Columbia on the subject of parity conservation in beta-decay before Lee and Yang’s famous paper was published. According to Wu, she mentioned to Lee that the best way would be to use a polarized cobalt-60 source for testing the assumption of parity violation in beta-decay.

Many physicists were aware of Lee and Yang’s paper, which was certainly seen as highly speculative, whereas Wu realized the opportunity to test the far-reaching consequences of parity violation. Since she was not a specialist of low-temperature nuclear alignment, she contacted Ernest Ambler at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington DC, who was a co-author on her Physics Review paper of 15 February 1957.

Hulthén describes in detail the severe technical challenges that Wu’s team had to overcome to carry out the experiment. These included achieving an exceptionally low temperature of 0.001 K, placing the detector inside the cryostat, and mitigating perturbations from the crystalline field that weakened the magnetic field’s effectiveness.

Despite these difficulties, the experimentalists managed to obtain a first indication of parity violations, which they presented on 4 January 1957 at a regular lunch that took place at Columbia every Friday. The news of these preliminary results spread like wildfire throughout the physics community, prompting other groups to immediately follow suit.

Hulthén mentions, for example, a measurement of the magnetic moment of the mu (μ) meson (now known as the muon) that Richard Garvin, Leon Lederman and Marcel Weinrich performed at Columbia’s cyclotron almost as soon as Lederman had obtained information of Wu’s work. He also cites work at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands led by C J Gorter that apparently had started to look into parity violation independently of Wu’s experiment (Physica 23 259).

Wu’s nominations

It is clear from Hulthén’s report that the Nobel Physics Committee was well informed about the experimental work carried out in the wake of Lee and Yang’s paper of October 1956, in particular the groundbreaking results of Wu. However, it is not clear from a subsequent report dated 20 September 1957 (see box below) from the Nobel Committee why Wigner was not awarded a share of the 1957 prize, despite his seven nominations. Nor is there any suggestion of postponing the prize a year in order to include Wu. The report was discussed on 23 October 1957 by members of the “Physics Class” – a group of physicists in the academy who always consider the committee’s recommendations – who unanimously endorsed it.

Most noteworthy with regard to this meeting of the Physics Class was that Meitner – who had also been overlooked for the Nobel prize – took part in the discussions. Meitner, who was Austrian by birth, had been elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, becoming a “Swedish member” after taking Swedish citizenship in 1951. In the wake of these discussions, the academy decided on 31 October 1957 to award the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics to Lee and Yang. We do not know, though, if Meitner argued for Wu to be awarded a share of that year’s prize.

A total of 23 nominations to give a Nobel prize to Wu reached the Nobel Committee on 10 separate years and she was nominated by 18 leading physicists, including various Nobel-prize winners and Tsung-Dao Lee himself

Although Wu did not receive any nominations in 1957, she was nominated the following year by the 1955 Nobel laureates in physics, Willis Lamb and Polykarp Kusch. In fact, after Lee and Yang won the prize, nominations to give a Nobel prize to Wu reached the committee on 10 separate years out of the next 16 (see graphic below). She was nominated by a total of 18 leading physicists, including various Nobel-prize winners and Lee himself. In fact, Lee nominated Wu for a Nobel prize on three separate occasions – in 1964, 1971 and 1972.

However, it appears she was never nominated by Yang (at the time of writing, we only have archive information up to 1974). One reason for Lee’s support and Yang’s silence could be attributed to the early discussions that Lee had with Wu, influencing the famous Lee and Yang paper, which Yang may not have been aware of. It is also not clear why Lee and Yang never acknowledged their discussion with Wu about the cobalt-60 experiment that was proposed in their paper; further research may shed more light on this topic.

Following Wu’s nomination in 1958, the Nobel Committee simply re-examined the investigations already carried out by Klein and Hulthén. The same procedure was repeated in subsequent years, but no new investigations into Wu’s work were carried out until 1971 when she received six nominations – the highest number she got in any one year.

That year the committee decided to ask Bengt Nagel, a theorist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, to investigate the theoretical importance of Wu’s experiments. The nominations she received for the Nobel prize concerned three experiments. In addition to her 1957 paper on parity violation there was a 1949 article she’d written with her Columbia colleague R D Albert verifying Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay (Phys. Rev. 75 315) and another she wrote in 1963 with Y K Lee and L W Mo on the conserved vector current, which is a fundamental hypothesis of the Standard Model of particle physics (Phys. Rev. Lett. 10 253).

After pointing out that four of the 1971 nominations came from Wu’s colleagues at Columbia, which to us may have hinted at a kind of lobbying campaign for her, Nagel stated that the three experiments had “without doubt been of great importance for our understanding of the weak interaction”. However, he added, “the experiments, at least the last two, have been conducted to certain aspects as commissioned or direct suggestions of theoreticians”.

In Nagel’s view, Wu’s work therefore differed significantly from, for example, James Cronin and Val Fritsch’s famous discovery in 1964 of charge-parity (CP) violation in the decay of K^o mesons. They had made their discovery under their own steam, whereas (Nagel suggested) Wu’s work had been carried out only after being suggested by theorists. “I feel somewhat hesitant whether their theoretical importance is a sufficient motivation to render Wu the Nobel prize,” Nagel concluded.

Missed opportunity

The Nobel archives are currently not open beyond 1974 so we don’t know if Wu received any further nominations over the next 23 years until her her death in 1997. Of course, had Wu not carried out her experimental test of parity violation, it is perfectly possible that another physicist or group of physicists would have something similar in due course.

Nevertheless, to us it was a missed opportunity not to include Wu as the third prize winner alongside Lee and Yang. Sure, she could not have won the prize in 1957 as she was not nominated for it and her key publication did not appear before the January deadline. But it would simply have been a case of waiting a year and giving Wu and her theoretical colleagues the prize jointly in 1958.

Another possible course of action would have been to single out the theoretical aspects of symmetry violation and award the prize to Lee, Wigner and Yang, as Klein had suggested in his report. Unfortunately, full details of the physics committee’s discussions are not contained in the archives, which means we don’t know if this was a genuine possibility being considered at the time.

But what is clear is that the Nobel committee knew full well the huge importance of Wu’s experimental confirmation of parity violation following the bold theoretical insights of Lee and Yang. Together, their work opened a new chapter in the world of physics. Without Wu’s interest in parity violation and her ingenious experimental knowledge, Lee and Yang would never have won the Nobel prize.

The post Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics appeared first on Physics World.

Cancer treatments using heavy ions offer several key advantages over conventional proton therapy: a sharper Bragg peak and small lateral scattering for precision tumour targeting, as well as high linear energy transfer (LET). High-LET radiation induces complex DNA damage in cancer cells, enabling effective treatment of even hypoxic, radioresistant tumours. A team at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) in Japan is now exploring the potential benefits of multi-ion therapy combining beams of carbon, oxygen and neon ions.

“Different ions exhibit distinct physical and biological characteristics,” explains QST researcher Takamitsu Masuda. “Combining them in a way that is tailored to the specific characteristics of a tumour and its environment allows us to enhance tumour control while reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues.”

The researchers are using multi-ion therapy to increase the dose-averaged LET (LET_d) within the tumour, performing a phase I trial at the QST Hospital to evaluate the safety and feasibility of this LET_d escalation for head-and-neck cancers. But while high LET_d prescriptions can improve treatment efficacy, increasing LET_d can also deteriorate plan robustness. This so-called “LET trilemma” – a complex trade-off between target dose homogeneity, range robustness and high LET_d – is a major challenge in particle therapy optimization.

In their latest study, reported in Physics in Medicine & Biology, Masuda and colleagues evaluated the impact of range and setup uncertainties on LET_d-optimized multi-ion treatment plans, examining strategies that could potentially overcome this LET trilemma.

Robustness evaluation

The team retrospectively analysed the data of six patients who had previously been treated with carbon-ion therapy. Patients 1, 2 and 3 had small, medium and large central tumours, respectively, and adjacent dose-limiting organs-at-risk (OARs); and patients 4, 5 and 6 had small, medium and large peripheral tumours and no dose-limiting OARs.

For each case, the researchers first generated baseline carbon-ion therapy plans and then incorporated oxygen- or neon-ion beams and tuned the plans to achieve a target LET_d of 90 keV/µm to the gross tumour volume (GTV).

Particle therapy plans can be affected by both range uncertainties and setup variations. To assess the impact of these uncertainties, the researchers recalculated the multi-ion plans to incorporate range deviations of +2.5% (overshoot) and –2.5% (undershoot) and various setup uncertainties, evaluating their combined effects on dose and LET_d distributions.

They found that range uncertainty was the main contributor to degraded plan quality. In general, range overshoot increased dose to the target, while undershoot decreased dose. Range uncertainties had the largest effect on small tumours and central tumours: patient #1 exhibited a deviation of around ±6% from the reference, while patient #3 showed a dose deviation of just ±1%. Robust target coverage was maintained in all large or peripheral tumours, but deteriorated in patient 1, leading to an uncertainty band of roughly 11%.

“Wide uncertainty bands indicate a higher risk that the intended dose may not be accurately delivered,” Masuda explains. “In particular, a pronounced lower band for the GTV suggests the potential for cold spots within the tumour, which could compromise local tumour control.”

The team also observed that range undershoot increased LET_d and overshoot decreased it, although absolute differences in LET_d within the entire target were small. Importantly, all OAR dose constraints were satisfied even in the largest error scenarios, with uncertainty bands comparable to those of conventional carbon-ion treatment plans.

Addressing the LET trilemma

To investigate strategies to improve plan robustness, the researchers created five new plans for patient 1, who had a small, central tumour that was particularly susceptible to uncertainties. They modified the original multi-ion plan (carbon- and oxygen-ion beams delivered at 70° and 290°) in five ways: expanding the target; altering the beam angles to orthogonal or opposing arrangements; increasing the number of irradiation fields to a four-field arrangement; and using oxygen ions for both beam ports (“heavier-ion selection”).

The heavier-ion selection plan proved the most effective in mitigating the effects of range uncertainty, substantially narrowing the dose uncertainty bands compared with the original plan. The team attribute this to the inherently higher LET_d in heavier ions, making the 90 keV/µm target easier to achieve with oxygen-ion beams alone. The other plan modifications led to limited improvements.

These findings suggest that strategically employing heavier ions to enhance plan robustness could help control the balance among range robustness, uniform dose and high LET_d – potentially offering a practical strategy to overcome the LET trilemma.

“Clinically, this strategy is particularly well-suited for small, deep-seated tumours and complex, variable sites such as the nasal cavity, where range uncertainties are amplified by depth, steep dose gradients and daily anatomical changes,” says Masuda. “In such cases, the use of heavier ions enables robust dose delivery with high LET_d.”

The researchers are now exploring the integration of emerging technologies – such as robust optimization, arc therapy, dual-energy CT, in-beam PET and online adaptation – to minimize uncertainties. “This integration is highly desirable for applying multi-ion therapy to challenging cases such as pancreatic cancer, where uncertainties are inherently large, or hypofractionated treatments, where even a single error can have a significant impact,” Masuda tells Physics World.

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Condensed-matter physics and materials science have a silo problem. Although researchers in these fields have access to vast amounts of data – from experimental records of crystal structures and conditions for synthesizing specific materials to theoretical calculations of electron band structures and topological properties – these datasets are often fragmented. Integrating experimental and theoretical data is a particularly significant challenge.

Researchers at the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and the Institute of Physics (IOP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently decided to address this challenge. Their new platform, MaterialsGalaxy, unifies data from experiment, computation and scientific literature, making it easier for scientists to identify previously hidden relationships between a material’s structure and its properties. In the longer term, their goal is to establish a “closed loop” in which experimental results validate theory and theoretical calculations guide experiments, accelerating the discovery of new materials by leveraging modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.

Physics World spoke to team co-leader Quansheng Wu to learn more about this new tool and how it can benefit the materials research community.

How does MaterialsGalaxy work?

The platform works by taking the atomic structure of materials and mathematically mapping it into a vast, multidimensional vector space. To do this, every material – regardless of whether its structure is known from experiment, from a theoretical calculation or from simulation – must first be converted into a unique structural vector that acts like a “fingerprint” for the material.

Then, when a MaterialsGalaxy user focuses on a material, the system automatically identifies its nearest neighbors in this vector space. This allows users to align heterogeneous data – for example, linking a synthesized crystal in one database with its calculated topological properties in another – even when different data sources define the material slightly differently.

The vector-based approach also enables the system to recommend “nearest neighbour” materials (analogs) to fill knowledge gaps, effectively guiding researchers from known data into unexplored territories. It does this by performing real-time vector similarity searches to dynamically link relevant experimental records, theoretical calculations and literature information. The result is a comprehensive profile for the material.

Where does data for MaterialsGalaxy come from?

We aggregated data from three primary channels: public databases; our institute’s own high-quality internal experimental records (known as the MatElab platform); and the scientific literature. All data underwent rigorous standardization using tools such as the pymatgen (Python Materials Genomics) materials analysis code and the spglib crystal structure library to ensure consistent definitions for crystal structures and physical properties.

Who were your collaborators on this project?

This project is a multi-disciplinary effort involving a close-knit collaboration among several research groups at the IOP, CAS and other leading institutions. My colleague Hongming Weng and I supervised the core development and design under the strategic guidance of Zhong Fang, while Tiannian Zhu (the lead author of our Chinese Physics B paper about MaterialsGalaxy) led the development of the platform’s architecture and core algorithms, as well as its technical implementation.

We enhanced the platform’s capabilities by integrating several previously published AI-driven tools developed by other team members. For example, Caiyuan Ye contributed the Con-CDVAE model for advanced crystal structure generation, while Jiaxuan Liu contributed VASPilot, which automates and streamlines first-principles calculations. Meanwhile, Qi Li contributed PXRDGen, a tool for simulating and generating powder X-ray diffraction patterns.

Finally, much of the richness of MaterialsGalaxy stems from the high-quality data it contains. This came from numerous collaborators, including Weng (who contributed the comprehensive topological materials database, Materiae), Youguo Shi (single-crystal growth), Shifeng Jin (crystal structure and diffraction), Jinbo Pan (layered materials), Qingbo Yan (2D ferroelectric materials), Yong Xu (nonlinear optical materials), and Xingqiu Chen (topological phonons). My own contribution was a library of AI-generated crystal structures produced by the Con-CDVAE model.

What does MaterialsGalaxy enable scientists to do that they couldn’t do before?

One major benefit is that it prevents researchers from becoming stalled when data for a specific material is missing. By leveraging the tool’s “structural analogs” feature, they can look to the properties or growth paths of similar materials for insights – a capability not available in traditional, isolated databases.

We also hope that MaterialsGalaxy will offer a bridge between theory and experiment. Traditionally, experimentalists tend to consult the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database while theorists check the Materials Project. Now, they can view the entire lifecycle of a material – from how to grow a single crystal (experiment) to its topological invariants (theory) – on a single platform.

Beyond querying known materials, MaterialsGalaxy also allows researchers to use integrated generative AI models to create new structures. These can be immediately compared against the known database to assess synthesis feasibility and potential performance throughout the “vertical comparison” workflow.

What do you plan to do next?

We’re focusing on enhancing the depth and breadth of the tool’s data fusion. For example, we plan to develop representations based on graph neural networks (GNNs) to better handle experimental data that may contain defects or disorder, thereby improving matching accuracy.

We’re also interested in moving beyond crystal structure by introducing multi-modal anchors such as electronic band structures, X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns and spectroscopic data. To do this, we plan to utilize technologies derived from computational linguistics and information processing (CLIP) to enable cross-modal retrieval, for example searching for theoretical band data by uploading an experimental XRD pattern.

Separately, we want to continue to expand our experimental data coverage, specifically targeting synthesis recipes and “failed” experimental records, which are crucial for training the next generation of “AI-enabled” scientists. Ultimately, we plan to connect an even wider array of databases, establishing robust links between them to realize a true Materials Galaxy of interconnected knowledge.

The post New project takes aim at theory-experiment gap in materials data appeared first on Physics World.