Four attendees at this year’s Global Physics Summit told APS News how they use AI to write code. Among them was a postdoc working on quantum simulations. He said AI can transform a five-hour coding task into a 15-minute chatbot conversation.

LHAASO has detected cosmic rays with energies of at least 0.3 PeV from the ancient but still expanding supernova IC 443. The discovery jibes with the idea that supernovae account for the cosmic-ray spectrum up to 3 PeV, beyond which other cosmic accelerators come into play.

Researchers have proposed a way to use external stimuli, such as electric fields, pressure, or temperature, to tune chirality in certain crystals. If the proposal is verified in the lab, new properties and functionalities in materials could be realized.

In quark-gluon plasma, particles lose energy via a scattering process called jet quenching. Observed first in lead-lead collisions, jet quenching has now been seen in oxygen–oxygen collisions, leaving open the question of how large a nucleus must be to produce quark–gluon plasma.

Certain devices superconduct in only one direction via the Josephson diode effect (JDE). Researchers have demonstrated a topological system in which the JDE can be tuned by varying the input voltage. This control could be useful in superconducting electronics and quantum circuits.

In a nematic state, the onset of strong fluctuations among interacting electrons spontaneously breaks a crystal’s rotational symmetry. Now researchers have proposed that the symmetry breaking arises not from a novel microscopic mechanism but from a geometric constraint.

Researchers working in Antarctica have detected ice-traversing radio waves that originate from cosmic-ray-induced particle showers. The result bodes well for detecting another kind of particle: highly energetic neutrinos.

Researchers are investigating how to extend the baseline of optical interferometry using quantum memories. In a recent demonstration they created an interference pattern from optical photons detected at two sites separated by 1.55 km of optical fiber.

Phenomena observed in moiré materials can be enriched by adding lead iodide, a layered semiconductor. In particular, researchers found that, for certain voltages, the material’s electrical conductance is equal to two-thirds of the conductance quantum.

Thanks to quantum tunneling, chemical reactions can occur between two stable configurations. Now researchers have demonstrated a quantum device that can precisely model such two-well systems.

The largest-ever high-resolution galaxy survey has concluded. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) scanned its last planned region of sky this past Tuesday, having recorded 47 million galaxies and quasars—13 million more objects than projected.

Using a novel quantum gas microscope, researchers have discovered an unexpected anticorrelation between opposite-spin atoms, implying deficiencies in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity.

When microparticles of the same insulating material collide, how do they become oppositely charged? Although the question remains unresolved, researchers have now uncovered an important clue: surface charge density is independent of particle size.

In so-called time multiplexing, one wire controls several qubits. Theorists have now found that although this strategy requires extra processing time, the associated delays are less than expected because control signals can be scheduled when other qubits are busy.

Scientists will find writing becomes easier if they stop striving for instant perfection and instead focus on incrementally improving a rough first draft, argues physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan.

Active materials could be used to make devices that spontaneously crawl over a difficult terrain—provided system-spanning networks are formed among the individual constituents of the system. Without the networks, microscopic activity remains local and the macroscopic response disappears.

In 1861 James Clerk Maxwell proposed that a magnet behaves like a spinning gyroscope. Now a research team has detected signatures of gyroscopic motion corresponding to Maxwell’s original ideas.

The conventional process for synthesizing ammonia is energy intensive and environmentally harmful. A greener alternative is now closer, thanks to theorists. They identified a semimetal whose topological surface states make it a potent catalyst for the process. physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

The electron’s g factor characterizes its magnetic moment. Researchers have now determined g for the electron in an ionized molecule of hydrogen and deuterium with record precision. The feat could lead to finding physics beyond the standard model.

Researchers have found the first experimental indication of a nucleus temporarily hosting a heavy two-quark particle called the 𝜂′ meson. Though awaiting confirmation, this exotic nucleus could give new insights into quantum chromodynamics.

Researchers used high-speed video and force measurements to capture how drops of cornstarch suspension, often referred to as Oobleck, act when they slam into a surface. The findings could help engineers better control complex fluids in 3D printing, industrial coating, and other applications.

When atoms are placed inside a cavity, the photons they exchange cause the ensemble to rearrange itself into a periodic pattern called a density wave. Now researchers have built a microscope to image this light-induced density wave for the first time.

Researchers have devised a “ghost tunnel”—a nearly perfect waveguide for sound that lets other sound waves cross its path undisturbed. The structure could find uses in complex sonar devices, where multiple signal channels must cross without interacting.

Researchers have adapted a 40-year-old technique, scanning tunneling potentiometry, to image current flows in a square sheet of graphene in an out-of-plane magnetic field. They found three distinct flow regimes, one of which surprised them.

Researchers have modeled groups of different species of social birds and insects as graph networks. Among their findings: Honeybees interact with up to 10 neighbors in their collective but, depending on the task, sometimes much fewer.

The quantum adiabatic theorem says that a slowly perturbed system stays in its instantaneous ground state. Now researchers have shown that this principle holds for the opposite limit: The ground state remains the most likely state even for a system subjected to an instantaneous perturbation.

Researchers have trapped polyatomic molecules at high densities and ultralow temperatures. These feats pave the way to creating gases of polyatomic molecules, which could one day underlie quantum simulators, quantum computers, atomic clocks, and quantum sensors.

Hair bundles are sensory organelles that convert mechanical input from sound into electrical output, which is then passed on to the brain. A new thermodynamic model suggests that hair bundles work like tiny machines that either extract power from incoming sound waves or inject power into them.

Researchers have devised a new method that crunches through catalogs of gravitational-wave signals to infer an important number in stellar evolution: the fraction of mergers than involve neutron stars.

Theorists have figured out a way to exploit certain symmetries to protect the quantum coherence of fermions in the face of invasive thermal noise and other perturbations.

As the energy of cosmic rays rises, their flux drops, declining more steeply beyond a few peta-electron-volts. The origin of this spectral feature, known as the knee, remains a mystery. But now researchers at LHAASO in China have uncovered a new and potentially decisive clue.

After 14 years of harvesting cosmic neutrinos, IceCube now has evidence for a knee-like downward bend in the neutrino spectrum at an energy of around 30 TeV. The feature could mean that high-energy neutrinos originate from more than one type of source.

Researchers have demonstrated a way to create multiple diamond-based quantum memory chips in parallel on a single silicon wafer. The feat could enable quantum technologies to enjoy the same benefits of scaling as silicon-based classical technologies.

Anyons—particles whose quantum statistics are between bosons and fermions—account for the hierarchy of fractional quantum Hall states. A new anyon experiment has shed light on the charge dynamics and thermodynamics of mesoscopic FQH physics.

A new analog model of a planetary atmosphere consists of a fluid in a rotating, meter-wide cylinder. Using video tracking, researchers charted how rotational motion is transferred from large vortices into smaller ones, a key feature of turbulence in real atmospheres.

Researchers have used measurements of rapidly rotating neutron stars to infer the distribution of dark matter in the Galaxy. Although the results are tentative, they suggest that dark matter may not be distributed evenly above and below the Galactic disk.

Researchers are investigating the timekeeping potential of continuous time crystals. These are systems that oscillate between different configurations despite being driven by a thermal gradient, a beam of light, or other aperiodic energy flow.

Quantum mechanics does not rule out superposition among a sequence of events. New experiments have not confined this so-called indefinite causal order, but they have closed several loopholes. The bizarre phenomenon could be real.

Researchers have demonstrated a way to efficiently control quantum information stored in a superconducting microwave while minimizing the errors that arise when the information is manipulated. The findings could help bring scalable, high-performance quantum computers closer to reality.

Theorists have predicted that a class of materials known as superconducting altermagnets can naturally generate and carry net spin supercurrents. Remarkably, these currents can propagate even in the presence of spin-orbit coupling and magnetic disorder.

By applying and then releasing pressure, researchers locked a high-temperature superconductor called Hg1223 in a metastable phase, enabling it to superconduct at ambient pressure at 151 K. That's 18 K higher than the previous record, also held by Hg1223.

Running machine-learning algorithms on quantum computers could expand their use to more complex problems and to quantum datasets. Now researchers have proposed a thermodynamics-inspired protocol that could make quantum machine-learning more efficient.

To serve as the sharp end of industrial cutting tool, a superhard material needs to resist fracture. Now researchers have toughened a brittle superhard ceramic, tungsten diboride, by planting vacancies in its atomic lattice.

A photonic molecule is a tiny optical cavity that couples resonant light modes. Traditionally, photonic molecules have consisted of two or more light-confining rings or crystals. Now researchers have built a molecule from a single resonant ring, making it more useful and adaptable.

Researchers have devised a new way to analyze surveys of the Lyman-alpha forest. This thicket of absorption lines appears in the spectra of quasars and is caused by neutral hydrogen atoms in the huge filaments that constitute the cosmic web.

Protein folding ends with the surmounting of an energy barrier to reach the final folded state. Now researchers have used high-resolution single-molecule methods to measure crossing times for eight small proteins, illuminating how proteins fold.

Researchers have shown how the frequencies and bandwidths of individual photons can be tuned over a wide range inside a short length of standard optical fiber. They anticipate that their technique will be useful in future quantum computing and communications networks.

Researchers were given access to thousands of circular trips logged by the social network app Foursquare. From that trove, they built a simple model that could account for the distribution of trip lengths.

Thunderstorms can cause 100-meter-scale regions in the atmosphere to generate bursts of gamma rays via cascades of relativistic electrons. Now theorists have predicted that a similar mechanism could work in centimeter-scale regions in dielectric solids.

The Rubin Observatory has released its first set of identifications of transient events in the night sky. Compiled over a single day, the dataset contains 800,000 events.