In December 1942 US president Franklin D Roosevelt signed the Manhattan Project into existence. A scientific endeavour that culminated in the dropping of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs three years later, the project was – for better or worse – the most significant development in the long history of nuclear physics. What is… Continue reading What can postage stamps tell us about the history of nuclear physics?

n This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features two pioneers in their fields. n Margaret Gardel is a biophysicist who is setting up a new National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center at the University of Chicago. The Center for Living Systems will focus on the physics of adaptation, a new field that looks… Continue reading Pioneering the physics of adaptation, writing the history of quantum computing

<p>An extraordinary burst of high-energy light in the sky has pointed astronomers to a pair of metal-forging neutron stars 900 million light years from Earth.</p>nn<p>In a <a href=”https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06759-1″ target=”_blank”>study appearing today</a> in <em>Nature</em>, an international team of astronomers, including scientists at MIT, reports the detection of an extremely bright gamma-ray burst (GRB), which is the… Continue reading Bright flash leads astronomers to a heavy-metal factory 900 million light years away

Laser-driven particle accelerators on silicon chips have been created by two independent research groups. With further improvements, such dielectric laser accelerators could be used in medicine and industry – and could even find application in high-energy particle physics experiments. nn Accelerating electrons to high energies is normally done over long distances at large and expensive… Continue reading Electrons accelerated by firing lasers into nanophotonic cavities

While proton therapy has well and truly arrived as a mainstream treatment option in radiation oncology – there are currently 42 operational proton facilities in the US and a further 13 centres under construction – it’s evident that the clinical innovation is only just getting started when it comes to at-scale deployment of protons for… Continue reading Proton therapy on an upward trajectory while FLASH treatment schemes get ready to shine

How it works: the noninvasive imaging technique combines acoustic radiation force and optical coherence tomography to produce 3D elastic wave speed maps of multiple eye components simultaneously. Left: cross-sectional image of a wave speed map of the anterior segment of the eyeball depicting different eye components: lens (L), iris (I), cornea (C), and sclera (S).… Continue reading Multi-eye-component imaging could help diagnose ocular disease

<p><em>The following article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project.</em></p>nn<p>In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct detection… Continue reading LIGO surpasses the quantum limit

Quantum bits (qubits) based on cold atoms are increasingly attractive candidates for quantum computing. However, targeting single atoms in an array with lasers to manipulate them individually for processing quantum information remains a challenge. Now,  Hannes Pichler at Austria’s University of Innsbruck and Francesco Cesa, who was visiting from Italy’s University of Trieste, have designed… Continue reading Quantum-computing protocol avoids targeting individual atoms in an array

Update 07/11/2023: The Lu-N-H paper (Nature 615 244) has since been retracted by the journal.   “I’m going to introduce a new material for the first time.” So said the condensed-matter physicist Ranga Dias to a packed conference room at the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Las Vegas earlier this year. The… Continue reading Superconductivity ‘damaged’ as researchers look to move on from retractions

While quantum computers show great promise for the future, today’s processors are small and noisy – and this makes it very difficult to do meaningful quantum calculations right now. To address this problem, researchers are developing clever quantum algorithms that make the most out of the hardware that is available today. Some of those algorithms… Continue reading Quantum algorithms make clever use of noisy hardware