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Laser pulses bring order to a quantum material’s tiny electrical regions

Physicists at Auburn University have used flashes of laser light to bring order to tiny electrically charged “islands” inside a crystal. The discovery helps answer a decades-old question about how the material organizes itself and shows how light could be used to control its behavior—a step toward exploring new technologies for processing and storing information.

The research was led by Wencan Jin, the Thomas and Jean Walter endowed associate professor in Auburn’s Department of Physics, and graduate student Mohamed Kandil.

Their study, “Optical Poling of a Quantum Ferroelectric Metal across the Order-Disorder Phase Transition,” was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Letters. Collaborators at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology grew the crystals used in the experiments.

New spectroscopy method enables direct comparisons of nuclear sizes across heavy elements

The size of a nucleus (nuclear charge radius) is an important physical quantity that reflects the arrangement of protons and neutrons within the nucleus. Particularly in deformed nuclei, such as those of rare-earth elements, examining changes in the charge radius can deepen our understanding of nuclear structure and nuclear deformation.

Until now, electron scattering experiments, muon atomic spectroscopy and laser spectroscopy of neutral atoms and singly charged ions have been used to measure nuclear radii; however, it has not been easy to directly compare different elements.

For lutetium (Lu) and ytterbium (Yb), evaluations based on past experiments had presented an anomalous trend not observed in other rare-earth elements: The nucleus of lutetium, which has an odd number of protons, is larger than that of the adjacent even-proton nucleus. This had remained an unsolved problem for many years.

Quantum calculations reveal how spin defects lose energy

When light hits a tiny defect embedded in a solid material like diamond or silicon carbide, it can kick the defect’s electrons into an excited state. These spin defects have the potential to be used as stable, readable qubits for quantum technologies, for example, quantum sensing. But modeling the full physics of their energetics over time—a key step in developing spin defects into new technologies—is a challenging task.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have built a computational framework that captures the full optical cycle of such spin defects, including the prediction of internal conversion, a process particularly hard to model.

Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, shed light on how to use the defects in the design of quantum materials and could also be applied to a different class of systems used in renewable energy conversion and storage.

MIT Astronomers Catch a Star Slowly Eating Its Companion 300 Light-Years Away

Astronomers have discovered a star slowly eating its companion in an extraordinary cosmic feast that could last billions of years.

A small star about 300 light-years from Earth is feeding on a companion that circles it every 87 minutes. The two objects are remarkably close, yet the star is drawing away material slowly enough that the feeding could continue for hundreds of thousands or even billions of years.

The pair, named ZTF J0440+2325, lies within the Milky Way. Its smaller member is a brown dwarf, a planetlike object that falls between planets and stars in mass. The brown dwarf has about 25 times Jupiter’s mass, while the star has about 85 times Jupiter’s mass. Both are small by stellar standards, and the brown dwarf’s entire orbit could fit within the Sun’s diameter.

Android gets AI defenses against messaging scams, fake calls

Google announced new AI-powered defenses against scam messages and call-forwarding abuse on Android, currently rolling out to eligible devices.

The new measures aim to address the increased sophistication of scams targeting mobile users, including fraudulent bank alerts and voice-cloning attacks.

“Mobile scams have evolved far beyond basic robocalls and phishing texts, turning into sophisticated operations that use spoofed numbers, fake bank alerts, and AI voice cloning,” Google says.

Hackers hijack D-Link, Ubiquiti devices to resell your stolen bandwidth

A proxyjacking campaign has impacted devices in 34 countries, monetizing victims’ internet connections through a commercial residential proxy network.

The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections, on devices without the owners’ consent.

Pawns.app account holders are rewarded for allowing traffic from other users to flow through their network, provided it runs on trusted, non-blocking IP addresses.

Fake Arch Linux packages push malware with root privileges

A threat actor uploaded malicious packages to the Arch User Repository (AUR) that impersonated two popular helper tools, yay and paru.

AUR is a community-maintained, widely-used package index for Arch Linux and derivative distributions that hosts package build scripts (PKGBUILDs) for third-party and proprietary tools, beta, or older package versions that are no longer available via the official Linux distribution channels.

The repository has recently become a target of malicious campaigns, including an attack in June in which 400 packages distributed credential-stealing malware with rootkit capabilities. Another campaign in July prompted Arch to temporarily disable package adoption.

Microsoft: Windows Server 2022 reached end of mainstream support

Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2022 has reached the end of mainstream support and will remain in extended support until October 2031.

Microsoft unveiled Windows Server 2022 in March 2021 and made it generally available in September 2021 as a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release with 10 years of support.

“As of October 13, 2026, Windows Server 2022 has reached end of mainstream support and transitioned to extended support. The October 2026 security update is the last mainstream support update available for this version,” it said.