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Into the neutrino fog: The ghosts haunting our search for dark matter

Ciaran O’Hare scribbles symbols using colored markers across his whiteboard like he’s trying to solve a crime—or perhaps planning one. He bounces around the edges of the board, slowly filling it with sharp angles and curling letters. I watch on, and when he senses I’m losing track, he pauses intermittently, allowing my brain to catch up. Ciaran speaks with an easy to understand British inflection, but the language on the whiteboard might as well be hieroglyphics.

Ciaran’s whiteboard doesn’t lay out a crime, but a mystery in the language of physics. In plain language, the mystery goes like this: everything we can see—with our eyes or elaborate telescopes—makes up only around 5% of the matter in our universe. There’s an invisible something out there that seems to bind the fabric of spacetime together. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there because of the force it exerts on the things we can see such as gigantic galaxies. The “something” is a phantom presence that touches our reality.

Scientists call it dark matter.

How superconductivity arises: New insights from moiré materials

How exactly unconventional superconductivity arises is one of the central questions of modern solid-state physics. A new study published in the journal Nature provides crucial insights into this question. For the first time, an international research team was able to demonstrate a direct microscopic connection between a strongly correlated normal state and superconductivity in so-called moiré materials. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new quantum materials and superconductors for future quantum technologies.

Professor Giorgio Sangiovanni from the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) was involved in the study. His research is part of the Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat—Complexity, Topology and Dynamics in Quantum Matter—at JMU and the Technical University of Dresden.

Surgery for quantum bits: Bit-flip errors corrected during superconducting qubit operations

Quantum computers hold great promise for exciting applications in the future, but for now they keep presenting physicists and engineers with a series of challenges and conundrums. One of them relates to decoherence and the errors that result from it: bit flips and phase flips. Such errors mean that the logical unit of a quantum computer, the qubit, can suddenly and unpredictably change its state from “0” to “1,” or that the relative phase of a superposition state can jump from positive to negative.

These errors can be held at bay by building a logical qubit out of many physical qubits and constantly applying error correction protocols. This approach takes care of storing the quantum information relatively safely over time. However, at some point it becomes necessary to exit storage mode and do something useful with the qubit—like applying a quantum gate, which is the building block of quantum algorithms.

The research group led by D-PHYS Professor Andreas Wallraff, in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the theory team of Professor Markus Müller at RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, has now demonstrated a technique that makes it possible to perform a quantum operation between superconducting logical qubits while correcting for potential errors occurring during the operation. The researchers have just published their results in Nature Physics.

AI-powered compressed imaging system developed for high-speed scenes

A research team from the Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (XIOPM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from the Institute National de la Recherche Scientifique, Canada, and Northwest University, has developed a single-shot compressed upconversion photoluminescence lifetime imaging (sCUPLI) system for high-speed imaging.

High-fidelity recovery from complex inverse problems remains a key challenge in compressed high-speed imaging. Deep learning has revolutionized the reconstruction, but pure end-to-end “black-box” networks often suffer from structural artifacts and high costs. To address these issues, the team from XIOPM propose a multi-prior physics-enhanced neural network (mPEN) in an article published in Ultrafast Science.

By integrating mPEN with compressed optical streak ultra-high-speed photography (COSUP), the researchers developed the sCUPLI system. This system utilized an encoding path for temporal shearing and a prior path to record unencoded integral images. It effectively suppressed artifacts and corrected spatial distortion by synergistically correcting multiple complementary priors including physical models, sparsity constraints, and deep image priors.

High-entropy garnet crystal enables enhanced 2.8 μm mid-infrared laser performance

Recently, a research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences successfully grew a high-entropy garnet-structured oxide crystal and achieved enhanced laser performance at the 2.8 μm wavelength band. By introducing a high-entropy design into a garnet crystal system, the team obtained a wide emission band near 2.8 μm and continuous-wave laser output with improved average power and beam quality, demonstrating the material’s strong potential as a high-performance gain medium for mid-infrared ultrashort-pulse lasers.

The results are published in Crystal Growth & Design.

Mid-infrared ultrashort-pulse lasers around 2.8 μm are of great interest for applications such as space communication and planetary exploration. However, existing laser crystals operating in this wavelength range often suffer from narrow emission bandwidths, low efficiency, or insufficient radiation resistance, making it difficult to meet the demands of efficient and stable laser operation in harsh space radiation environments.

Dark matter, not a black hole, could power Milky Way’s heart

Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its center but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence, astronomers say. They believe this invisible substance—which makes up most of the universe’s mass—can explain both the violent dance of stars just light-hours (often used to measure distances within our own solar system) away from the galactic center and the gentle, large-scale rotation of the entire matter in the outskirts of the Milky Way.

The new study has been published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A ‘crazy’ dice proof leads to a new understanding of a fundamental law of physics

Right now, molecules in the air are moving around you in chaotic and unpredictable ways. To make sense of such systems, physicists use a law known as the Boltzmann distribution, which, rather than describe exactly where each particle is, describes the chance of finding the system in any of its possible states. This allows them to make predictions about the whole system even though the individual particle motions are random. It’s like rolling a single die: Any one roll is unpredictable, but if you keep rolling it again and again, a pattern of probabilities will emerge.

Developed in the latter half of the 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist and mathematician, this Boltzmann distribution is used widely today to model systems in many fields, ranging from AI to economics, where it is called “multinomial logit.”

Now, economists have taken a deeper look at this universal law and come up with a surprising result: The Boltzmann distribution, their mathematical proof shows, is the only law that accurately describes unrelated, or uncoupled, systems.

VIP-2 experiment narrows the search for exotic physics beyond the Pauli exclusion principle

The Pauli exclusion principle is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics and is essential for the structure and stability of matter. Now an international collaboration of physicists has carried out one of the most stringent experimental tests to date of this foundational rule of quantum physics and has found no evidence of its violation. Using the VIP-2 experiment, the team has set the strongest limits so far for possible violations involving electrons in atomic systems, significantly constraining a range of speculative theories beyond the Standard Model, including those that suggest electrons have internal structure, and so-called “Quon models.” Their experiment was reported in Scientific Reports in November 2025.

Austrian-Swiss physicist Wolfgang Pauli outlined the exclusion principle in 1925. It states that two identical “fermions” (a class of particles that includes electrons) cannot occupy the same quantum state. It explains why electrons fill atomic shells, why solids have rigidity, and why dense objects such as white dwarf stars do not collapse under gravity.

However, since its inception, physicists have been searching for signs that the Pauli exclusion principle may be violated in extreme conditions. “If the Pauli exclusion principle were violated, even at an extremely small level, the consequences would cascade from atomic physics all the way to astrophysics,” says FQxI member and physicist Catalina Curceanu of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), in Frascati, who is the spokesperson of the VIP-2 collaboration.

Tuning topological superconductors into existence by adjusting the ratio of two elements

Today’s most powerful computers hit a wall when tackling certain problems, from designing new drugs to cracking encryption codes. Error-free quantum computers promise to overcome those challenges, but building them requires materials with exotic properties of topological superconductors that are incredibly difficult to produce. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and West Virginia University have found a way to tune these materials into existence by simply tweaking a chemical recipe, resulting in a change in many-electron interactions.

The team adjusted the ratio of two elements— tellurium and selenium —that are grown in ultra-thin films. By doing so, they found they could switch the material between different quantum phases, including a highly desirable state called a topological superconductor.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal that as the ratio of tellurium and selenium changes, so too do the correlations between different electrons in the material—how strongly each electron is influenced by those around it. This can serve as a sensitive control knob for engineering exotic quantum phases.

When lasers cross: A brighter way to measure plasma

Measuring conditions in volatile clouds of superheated gases known as plasmas is central to pursuing greater scientific understanding of how stars, nuclear detonations and fusion energy work. For decades, scientists have relied on a technique called Thomson scattering, which uses a single laser beam to scatter from plasma waves as a way to measure critical information such as plasma temperature, density and flow.

Now, however, a multidisciplinary team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers has successfully demonstrated a potentially simpler, more accurate way to measure plasma conditions with two laser beams that cross paths, creating a data signal that is about a billion times stronger than what is available from the Thomson scattering method.

This method could give physicists working on complex high energy density science and inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research at facilities like LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) an innovative new tool.

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