9 D Universe

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 [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]