9 D Universe

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 [...]

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 [...]

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzNova Jacobs reflects on how she came to write murder mysteries set in the world of physics.[Physics 19, 14] Published Fri Feb 06, 2026 [...]

Author(s): Michael SchirberExperiments with structured light beams provide the first observation of “lump” solitons, shape-preserving solitary waves in a 2D setting.[Physics 19, s22] Published Fri Feb 06, 2026 [...]

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 [...]

Cosmic rays are extremely fast, charged particles that travel through space at nearly the speed of light. The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It is the second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed, carrying around 40 million times more energy than particles accelerated [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

High-level backing “Quantum Metrology: From Foundations to the Future” was held at NPL as part of the global celebrations for the UNESCO International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. Above: Lord Vallance, UK Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear, opens the workshop with the official launch of the NMI-Q [...]

Massively quantum: The University of Vienna’s Multi-Scale Cluster Interference Experiment (MUSCLE), where researchers detected quantum interference in massive nanoparticles. (Courtesy: S Pedalino / Uni Wien) 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 [...]

A supermassive black hole with a case of cosmic indigestion has been burping out the remains of a shredded star for four years—and it's still going strong, new research led by a University of Oregon astrophysicist shows. [...]

For the first time, the new scope allowed physicists to observe terahertz “jiggles” in a superconducting fluid. You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light you shine at it: Optical light illuminates a material’s surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a [...]

Author(s): Charles DayA crystal whose arrangement of atoms lacks chirality can nevertheless host a chiral electronic state.[Physics 19, s17] Published Wed Feb 04, 2026 [...]

Author(s): Ryan WilkinsonBy exploiting defects in a superconductor, scientists have observed the switching of a material’s two superconducting states into one.[Physics 19, s14] Published Wed Feb 04, 2026 [...]

Gigantic black holes lurk at the center of virtually every galaxy, including ours, but we've lacked a precise picture of what impact they have on their surroundings. However, a University of Chicago-led group of scientists has used data from a recently launched satellite to reveal our clearest look yet into [...]

Author(s): Marric StephensFabricating some structures using niobium instead of aluminum could lead to more resilient superconducting quantum computers.[Physics 19, s20] Published Tue Feb 03, 2026 [...]

The light from MoM-z14 galaxy has been traveling through space for about 13.5 billion years. Rohan Naidu, Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics, astrophysics, NASA Hubble Fellow https://gizmodo.com/the-age-of-the-most-distant-galaxy-ever-seen-barely-makes-any-sense-2000715503 The post The Age of the Most Distant Galaxy Ever Seen Barely Makes Any Sense appeared first on MIT Physics. [...]

Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an Earth quasi-satellite whose reported spectrum resembles lunar material and which is a target of China's Tianwen-2 [...]

A Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials [...]

Author(s): Vittorio SomàCalculations show how the mysterious “magic numbers” that stabilize nuclear structures emerge naturally from nuclear forces—once these are described with appropriate spatial resolution.[Physics 19, 11] Published Mon Feb 02, 2026 [...]

Can scenarios inspired by science fiction help anticipate the effects of future technologies?[Physics 19, 15] Published Mon Feb 02, 2026 [...]