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Engineers teach spacecraft to ‘dream’ their way to the space station

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone aboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resulting debris field could wipe out dozens of satellites and even harm people on the ground. No pressure, obviously.

For decades, aerospace engineers have docked successfully using hard-coded physics equations and human pilots to make corrections. But now, a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server from researchers at Stanford is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

Their solution is called the Out-of-this-World-Model (OWM), but before we get to what that is, it’s best to recap how we typically navigate in low Earth orbit (LEO). Traditionally, navigation computers use a type of algorithm called a guidance, navigation and control (GNC) algorithm. They also take advantage of another mathematical tool called an extended Kalman filter, which helps them take in data from GPS receivers and star trackers and output thruster burn duty cycles.

New form of flexible boron is 10 million times more electrically conductive

The atoms of the 5th element of the periodic table often find themselves in the company of each other, forming allotropes with a rich variety of structural motifs, each carrying a unique set of chemical and physical properties. Despite the long catalog, most boron allotropes do not simultaneously possess high electrical conductivity and plasticity, but a recent study has expanded the portfolio.

Scientists have now designed a new allotrope called Imma-B60 by washing out the sodium from the sodium boride compound Na4B60. Their findings are published in Nature Chemistry.

Unlike the dense, tightly packed atomic arrangements found in standard forms of elemental boron, Imma-B60 forms a porous open framework built from 12-atom boron cages connected by 3-atom triangular boron units. This unique structure shifts internally under stress, allowing the allotrope to be flexible and deform by 23% without shattering. Imma-B60 also conducts electricity 10 million times better than the common form of boron, thanks to its very narrow bandgap of under 0.2 eV.

Reading hidden topology in light, even when energy leaks away

When I explain topology to students, I start with a knot in a rope. You can stretch it, twist it or shake it, but the knot stays until you cut the rope. Physicists have found that some materials and devices carry similar “knots” in how waves move through them. These are topological properties, labeled by whole numbers that don’t change under small imperfections. That robustness is why topology has become one of the central ideas in modern physics. It promises electronics, photonics and quantum devices that tolerate defects and noise.

There is a catch that has always bothered us. These topological numbers live in what physicists call momentum space. It’s an abstract space that describes how a wave travels, not where it is.

In most experiments, nobody looks at momentum space directly. Instead, we infer the topology from its consequences, such as special states appearing at the edges of a carefully fabricated sample. That works, but it is a bit like working out whether a rope is knotted by looking only at its ends.

Scientists uncover recurrent patterns within chaotic quantum behavior

Many complex quantum systems rapidly lose the recognizable patterns of their initial states as their components interact. To describe patterns of regular and chaotic motion in specific systems, physicists can construct a mathematical map called an effective phase space.

In some classical systems that follow familiar laws of motion, orderly and chaotic paths occupy different regions of phase space. Yet establishing whether a comparable pattern exists in quantum many-body systems (i.e., systems with many interacting quantum components) has so far proved challenging, partly because interactions in these systems can produce a quantum phenomenon called entanglement.

When parts of a system are entangled, their combined quantum state cannot be fully described by treating each independently.

Quantum interactions may have locked early universe’s fields into existing energy states

The universe may be trapped in its own comfort zone, and a researcher in the College of Engineering and Computer Science has helped explain why it cannot seem to leave. A new study suggests the universe could be locked into its current state by the same kinds of quantum effects that scientists study when trying to preserve fragile information inside a quantum computer.

The paper, titled “Cosmic Lockdown: When Decoherence Saves the Universe from Tunneling,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

It was written by Gregory Kaplanek, a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Jason Pollack, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with four collaborators: Robson Christie and Jaewoo Joo of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, Vincent Vennin of the Laboratoire de Physique de l’Ecole Normale Superieure in France and David Wands, also of Portsmouth. Kaplanek and Pollack are part of Syracuse University’s Institute for Quantum and Information Sciences.

A novel path to fusion ignition: Heat first, then add fuel

For more than 70 years, fusion energy researchers have used a particular equation to judge whether a plasma would stay hot and dense enough—for long enough—to reach a point where it could sustain itself without any more external power added. While that equation marks the finish line, also known as ignition, it says nothing about the best way to reach it. New research from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) maps a path to ignition conditions using far less energy than any other path.

The original “ideal” equation, known as the Lawson criterion, was first developed in the 1950s. Now PPPL physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio, Masayuki Ono and Jonathan Menard have reformulated that ideal criterion while adding four other conditions for reaching and holding a burning plasma to plan the best process for heating and powering the plasma within a fusion energy system. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Plasma is the fourth state of matter: a hot gas made of electrically charged particles. A burning plasma is one that has reached the point of ignition. It has enough heat from fusion reactions to keep the plasma burning without any more external heating. Reaching ignition efficiently is a central goal of fusion energy research.

Atomic motion could help push solar cells beyond conventional limits

The bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE), a photoelectric effect that generates photocurrent without a p–n junction, can persist even when a material’s average crystal structure remains centrosymmetric, a study from Institute of Science Tokyo has found. Researchers demonstrated this in CuCrP2S6, a van der Waals material that transitions from a noncentrosymmetric to a centrosymmetric average structure. The finding challenges the conventional view of BPVE and suggests a new strategy for enhancing photoelectric conversion.

Conventional solar cells generate photocurrent by separating and transporting light-generated charge carriers, typically through structures such as p–n junctions. This approach has a fundamental theoretical efficiency limit, known as the Shockley–Queisser limit. For an ideal single-junction silicon solar cell, this limit is about 33%.

The bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE) offers an alternative way of generating photocurrent that is not subject to the same Shockley–Queisser limit. In BPVE, light interacts with a material to generate photocurrent without requiring a p–n junction. BPVE has traditionally been associated with noncentrosymmetric crystal structures.

Atom-thin material could overcome key transistor bottleneck for next-generation computer chips

If computer chips could be built from semiconductors just one atom thick, they could pack far more transistors into a smaller space while using less power. So far, however, the technology has been held back by the weakness of “p-type” transistors, which make up half of every modern chip.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers led by Vincent Tung at the University of Tokyo have shown that atom-thin sheets of boron carbon nitride (BCN) could offer a promising solution.

Lightsaber-like plasma antenna uses laser-ionized air to transmit radio waves

Researchers have demonstrated a technique that uses a laser to produce a plasma beam antenna capable of transmitting radio waves. The article, “Laser-Induced-Plasma-Filament Antenna Transmitting 30 MHz VHF,” is published in the IEEE Journal of Microwaves.

“The plasma beam antenna looks like a lightsaber and is tunable, meaning we should be able to transmit across a broad range of frequencies,” says Prya Darshni, corresponding author and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. “And while we have not demonstrated its ability to serve as an antenna that can receive radio signals, there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t also work as a receiver.”

“This is an exciting new concept that enables one to be able to have a customized antenna without complex mechanical deployment mechanisms,” says Paul Franzon, co-author of the paper and the Cirrus Logic distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State.

Quantum systems never quite forget where they came from

Even the most chaotic quantum systems keep a permanent mark of their own past—a “quantum birthmark”—that never fades. Researchers from Tampere University, Harvard University and TU Dresden discovered the feature in their recent study. Their findings shed new light on the elusive relationship between classical and quantum mechanics. Looking ahead, these quantum birthmarks, along with related phenomena known as “scars,” could eventually be harnessed to power next-generation nanoelectronics.

Stir a drop of milk into a cup of tea and it is gone for good. The swirl blurs, spreads and evens out, and no amount of staring at the cup will tell you where the drop first landed. Physicists refer to this kind of unpredictable, memory-erasing behavior simply as chaos, and it underpins much of how we explain the everyday world: heat spreading through a room, smoke filling the air, a pinball rattling away from wherever it was launched.

The new study shows that the quantum realm—the world of atoms and electrons—does not play by that rule. There, the earliest moments leave a signature that never washes out. The study “Quantum Birthmarks: Ergodicity Breaking Beyond Scarring” was published in Physical Review X on Sept. 10, 2026.

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