When a molecule absorbs a hard X-ray photon, a core electron is ejected and the resulting inner-shell vacancy decays through an Auger–Meitner cascade: electrons rearrange in a rapid, Coulomb-driven many-body process, and the initially compact, localized hole in the electron density grows diffuse and spreads across the molecule before it fragments. Spectroscopy can track which states are involved, but it does not directly reveal how the electrons rearrange in real space.
An international team led by Mats Simmermacher, Nathan Goff and Peter M. Weber (Brown University, with the University of Edinburgh and partners) used non-resonant hard X-ray scattering at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to image the change in the radial electron-pair density of sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) as it undergoes Auger–Meitner decay. They exploit a second-order process — one X-ray photon ionizes the molecule and a second photon from the same pulse scatters off it — capturing the electron loss and redistribution with a sub-15-femtosecond effective time resolution. The measured “pair-density hole” deepens, broadens and migrates from the atomic cores into the valence, in close agreement with ab initio modelling. The method opens a route to real-space, ultrafast imaging of correlated electron dynamics relevant to radiation damage and radiotherapy. Published (open access) in Nature Physics.
🔭 / ヴェラ・C・ルービン天文台、10年間の「LSST」本観測を正式開始——世界最大の32億画素カメラで南天全体を数夜ごとに撮影し続け、宇宙史上最も包括的な「宇宙の映画」を制作する10年サーベイ（Legacy Survey of Space and Time）が始動。毎晩約10テラバイトのデータと最大700万件のアラートを生成（NSF・DOE・Rubin Observatory発表）
The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile announced on June 30 that its signature 10-year campaign, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), has officially begun — the start of what the team calls “the greatest cosmic movie ever made.” Over the next decade, Rubin will repeatedly observe the entire southern sky every few nights, building an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe. The milestone follows the celebratory “First Look” event of June 2025, final commissioning, an operational readiness review, and the start of the alert stream.
The observatory pairs the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with the 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera — the largest digital camera in the world — capturing a new detailed image roughly every 40 seconds. Each night Rubin collects about 10 terabytes of data and issues up to 7 million alerts of changes in the sky, streamed to automated “alert brokers” so telescopes worldwide can follow up on supernovae, active black holes and compact-object collisions. A 1.7-gigapixel image of a star field in Lupus was released to showcase the system. Rubin, jointly operated by NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is expected to catalogue billions of objects with trillions of measurements — probing dark energy, dark matter, the Milky Way and the transient sky. “Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF Director.
Keywords: Vera C. Rubin Observatory, ヴェラ・ルービン天文台, LSST, Legacy Survey of Space and Time, 時空のレガシーサーベイ, Simonyi Survey Telescope, LSST Camera, 32億画素カメラ, survey astronomy, サーベイ天文学
When identical fermions fill up the available energy levels from the bottom, one particle per level because of the Pauli exclusion principle, they form a Fermi sea with a sharp outer edge. A fractional Fermi sea keeps that sharp edge but breaks the occupancy rule inside: the levels are only partially filled, with fractional rather than integer occupation numbers — a possibility allowed by Haldane’s 1991 generalized exclusion statistics but never before realized in a controlled quantum system.
A team from the Nägerl group at the University of Innsbruck, with theory collaborator Alvise Bastianello (CNRS / Université Paris-Dauphine), showed that this exotic state can be quantum-engineered in a one-dimensional gas of ultracold cesium atoms. Cyclically driving the atoms’ interactions between strongly repulsive and strongly attractive regimes forces the initial ground state not simply to heat up, but to reorganize into a highly excited yet highly ordered non-equilibrium configuration — the fractional Fermi sea. Its correlation patterns differ from those of the celebrated Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid, the standard description of 1D quantum systems, pointing to an entirely new critical phase and opening fresh possibilities for cold-atom quantum simulation. Published in Physical Review Letters.
In strongly correlated materials, electrons can spontaneously organize not only their charge and spin but also which orbitals they occupy — so-called orbital order. Whether a pure orbital order can exist with a clear, measurable fingerprint in the electronic band structure — without being accompanied by a structural distortion or magnetic order — had remained an open question.
Zhanyang Hao, Haohao Sheng, Chaoyu Chen and colleagues report surface d-orbital order driven by rare-earth 5d electrons in an intermetallic compound, observed without any accompanying structural or magnetic order. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy together with supporting theory, they identify a distinct band-structure signature of the orbital order localized at the surface — direct evidence that orbital degrees of freedom alone can drive an ordered electronic state. The result clarifies a long-debated question about orbital physics in correlated metals. Published (open access) in Nature Physics.
Single molecules that host an isolated electron spin are promising building blocks for qubits and quantum sensors, but to use them one needs a fast, local way to control each spin. Magnetic fields are hard to confine to a single molecule; an electric handle would be far more practical — yet spins do not couple to electric fields directly.
Paul Greule, Wantong Huang, Philip Willke and colleagues demonstrate exchange-mediated spin–electric control of single molecules on a surface. By using the exchange interaction between a molecule’s spin and a nearby magnetic probe as an intermediary, an applied electric field shifts the spin states electrically — and they show this works for two different molecular species, indicating the mechanism is general. Combining the atomic-scale spatial precision of scanning-probe techniques with all-electric spin control is a useful step toward scalable molecular quantum devices. Published (open access) in Nature Physics.
Paul Greule、Wantong Huang、Philip Willkeらは、表面上の単一分子のスピンを交換相互作用を介して電気的に制御することを実証した。分子のスピンと近接する磁性プローブとの交換相互作用を“仲立ち”に使うことで、加えた電場がスピン状態を電気的にシフトさせる。しかもこれが2種類の異なる分子で成り立つことを示し、機構が一般的であることを示唆した。走査プローブ技術の原子スケールの空間精度と、全電気的なスピン制御を組み合わせる本成果は、拡張可能な分子量子デバイスへの一歩となる。Nature Physicsにオープンアクセスで掲載。
Superconductors carry electricity with zero resistance, but almost all known ones require expensive near-absolute-zero cooling, and the space of possible element combinations is astronomically large — so finding new ones by trial and error is slow.
Using a machine-learning-guided search, a team identified two new kagome-lattice superconductors, YRu₃B₂ and LuRu₃B₂. The kagome lattice — a pattern of corner-sharing triangles — is a fertile setting for exotic electronic states. The work is part of a broader effort by the SuperC consortium (Päivi Törmä and colleagues) to accelerate superconductor discovery and, ultimately, to work toward materials that superconduct closer to room temperature — which could sharply cut the energy footprint of computing and power infrastructure. Published in Physical Review Research.
On 29 June 2026, CERN switched off the Large Hadron Collider and formally began Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), a multi-year programme of maintenance, consolidation and upgrades that prepares the laboratory for the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC). The LHC had circulated its first beams in September 2008; LS3 closes the machine’s first great chapter.
Teams will dismantle about 1.2 kilometres of the accelerator to install new HiLumi equipment, connected to hardware already placed in the new HiLumi galleries — including a new cryogenic line delivered in sections. Other major projects include consolidation of the SPS North Area, dismantling of the former CNGS (CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso) target area, conversion of ECN3 into a high-intensity fixed-target facility, and modernisation at ISOLDE, alongside upgrades to electrical infrastructure, technical galleries and personnel safety systems. The ATLAS and CMS detectors undergo comprehensive rebuilds to cope with the far denser collision environment. No beams circulate during LS3, but analysis of the accumulated LHC datasets continues; the accelerator complex restarts gradually from 2028, with HL-LHC operation from 2030.
When electricity flows through a metal, energy is lost as heat because the charge carriers scatter — off each other and off the material. A long-standing question is whether that collisional resistivity can grow without limit as scattering gets stronger, or whether quantum mechanics imposes a ceiling.
A team from the University of Toronto, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Lehigh University answered it with a clean quantum simulator: fermionic potassium-40 atoms cooled to just above absolute zero and loaded into an optical lattice, standing in for electrons in a metal but free of disorder and phonons. As the atoms were driven to collide harder and harder, the resistivity stopped climbing and levelled off into a plateau — a phenomenon the authors call collisional resistivity saturation, whose origin is a quantum bound they name lattice unitarity. The result gives a concrete benchmark: if a real material’s electron–electron contribution to resistivity exceeds this ceiling, its charge carriers cannot be conventional electrons. That matters for strange metals — the phase above the superconducting transition in cuprates — whose resistivity rises linearly with temperature with no sign of saturation, at a scattering rate of roughly kBT/ℏ (“Planckian dissipation”), a puzzle open since the 1980s. Published in Physical Review Letters on 26 May 2026 and widely covered at the end of June.
The Ising model — spins that are either up or down and prefer to align with their neighbours — is the textbook model of phase transitions. But it only encodes pairwise interactions. Many real systems (social groups, neural and biochemical networks) instead involve higher-order interactions, where three or more elements act together. Such structures are naturally described by hypergraphs, in which a single “hyperedge” can connect many nodes at once.
Gangmin Son, Deok-Sun Lee and K.-I. Goh study a simplicial Ising model on hypergraphs, in which a hyperedge lowers the energy only when all of its spins point the same way (unanimous alignment). They find that the size of the hyperedges dramatically reshapes the thermodynamics, producing a rich variety of phase transitions — including unusual mixed-order transitions (combining features of continuous and abrupt transitions) and double transitions. The results sharpen our understanding of how collective order emerges in systems with group-wise interactions. The study is published in Communications Physics.
At 05:52 on 27 June 2026, the final protons of the LHC’s third data-taking period circulated through the accelerator, bringing Run 3 to a close. For the thousands of scientists and engineers of the ATLAS Collaboration, the moment marks a transition rather than an ending.
Over its lifetime ATLAS has now recorded 505 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data, of which 332 fb−1 was collected during Run 3 alone — with high data-taking efficiency maintained across proton–proton, heavy-ion and specialised low-energy runs, according to Run Coordinator Eric Torrence. The next several years go to transforming both the accelerator and the detector for the High-Luminosity LHC, with beams returning in 2030. The upgrade sharply raises the collider’s luminosity: roughly 200 proton–proton collisions per bunch crossing are expected, an extraordinarily dense environment that delivers immense statistical power for studying the structure of matter and its fundamental interactions.
Driving a two-level emitter with light produces Rabi oscillations, but in a solid the emitter couples to lattice vibrations (phonons), which damp those oscillations as the drive strengthens. A 2007 theory (Vagov et al.) predicted that because the phonon spectral density is non-monotonic in energy, the oscillations should reappear at still higher drive — an effect that had lived only in idealized models.
Physicists at Paderborn University with TU Dortmund and Johannes Kepler University Linz (L. Hanschke, T. K. Bracht, … S. Schumacher, D. E. Reiter, K. D. Jöns) experimentally demonstrated this reappearance of Rabi rotations in a resonantly driven GaAs quantum dot: emission intensity first damps with phonon coupling, then is restored under sufficiently strong optical excitation. Theory not only explained but refined the data, and the effect is a clear signature of the dots’ high coherence and controllability — a step toward scalable quantum-dot applications. The paper appeared in Physical Review Letters in 2025; Paderborn University announced the result on June 26, 2026.
パーダーボルン大学を中心に、TUドルトムント、ヨハネス・ケプラー大学リンツの物理学者ら（L. Hanschke、T. K. Bracht、… S. Schumacher、D. E. Reiter、K. D. Jöns）は、共鳴駆動したGaAs量子ドットでこのラビ振動の復活を実験的に実証した。発光強度はフォノン結合でいったん減衰した後、十分に強い光励起でふたたび回復する。理論は実験を説明するだけでなく精緻化まで行い、この効果は量子ドットの高いコヒーレンスと制御性を明確に示す——スケール可能な量子ドット応用への一歩となる。論文はPhysical Review Lettersに2025年に掲載され、パーダーボルン大学が2026年6月26日に成果を発表した。
🪐 / 「綿菓子より軽い」巨大惑星を2つ発見——木星ほどの大きさなのに、密度がわずか0.038・0.047 g/cm³しかない“スーパーパフ（超ふわふわ）惑星”のペアを、太陽に似た恒星TOI-791のまわりに確認。惑星形成の理論に課題を突きつける（オックスフォード大学ほか国際チーム、Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society掲載）
“Super-puff” planets are a rare and puzzling class of exoplanet: roughly the size of a gas giant, yet with such tiny masses that their average densities rival cotton candy or whipped cream. They defy standard models of how giant planets form, which assume a dense core gradually accreting gas — and fewer than a couple dozen are known.
An international collaboration led by the University of Oxford, with Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the University of Birmingham, confirmed two such worlds, TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, orbiting an F7-type Sun-like star about 1,110 light-years away in the constellation Volans. Both are roughly Jupiter-sized but extraordinarily diffuse: TOI-791 b has a density of just 0.038 g/cm³ and TOI-791 c about 0.047 g/cm³ — some 28–35 times less dense than Jupiter. Because the planets have long orbital periods (139 and 232 days) and hours-long transits, NASA’s TESS satellite needed about 1,122 days of observations over seven years, aided by the Antarctic ASTEP telescope’s months of uninterrupted winter darkness, to capture and confirm them. Transit-timing variations from the planets’ mutual gravitational tugs pinned down their masses. The system is a rare natural laboratory for understanding how super-puffs form and evolve. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
オックスフォード大学が主導し、コート・ダジュール大学／コート・ダジュール天文台、バーミンガム大学が参加した国際チームは、こうした惑星を2つ確認した。とびうお座の方向、約1,110光年先にある太陽に似たF7型星TOI-791を回るTOI-791 b と TOI-791 cだ。どちらも木星ほどの大きさだが、きわめて希薄で、TOI-791 bの密度はわずか0.038 g/cm³、TOI-791 cは約0.047 g/cm³——木星のおよそ28〜35分の1の密度しかない。公転周期が長く（139日と232日）、トランジット（恒星面通過）も数時間に及ぶため、NASAのTESS衛星は7年かけて約1,122日分の観測を積み重ね、南極のASTEP望遠鏡による数か月連続の冬の暗夜の助けも借りて、ようやく捉えて確認した。2惑星が互いに及ぼす重力によるトランジット時刻の変動から、それぞれの質量が精密に決められた。スーパーパフ惑星の形成と進化を探る、またとない天然の実験室である。Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyに掲載。
Rare-earth dopants — individual rare-earth ions embedded in a crystal — are attractive building blocks for quantum networks and quantum memories, because their electron and nuclear spins can store quantum information for a long time and emit photons for communication. To build useful devices, one must control each spin individually. But when many dopants sit close together so they can interact (a prerequisite for two-qubit operations), they are typically packed more tightly than the diffraction limit of light, making it hard to address just one without disturbing its neighbours.
Haitong Xu, Mehmet T. Uysal and Jeff D. Thompson at Princeton University demonstrate coherent control of individual, interacting solid-state spins below the optical diffraction limit. Using rare-earth ions whose optical transition frequencies differ slightly from one another, they selectively drive a single chosen spin even when several lie within one diffraction-limited spot — and show that the controlled spins remain coherent. This sub-diffraction single-spin addressing of interacting qubits is a key step toward scalable, optically connected quantum processors and networks. The work appears in Nature Physics.
プリンストン大学のHaitong Xu、Mehmet T. Uysal、Jeff D. Thompsonらは、光の回折限界より狭い間隔で、互いに相互作用する個々の固体スピンをコヒーレントに制御した。各イオンの光学遷移周波数がわずかに異なることを利用し、同じ回折限界のスポット内に複数のスピンがあっても選んだ一つだけを駆動し、そのスピンがコヒーレンスを保つことを示した。相互作用するビットの回折限界以下での単一スピンアドレスは、拡張可能で光結合された量子プロセッサやネットワークへの重要な一歩となる。成果はNature Physicsに掲載された。
During development and wound healing, sheets of cells reshape themselves through cell intercalation — neighbouring cells swapping positions so the tissue can lengthen, narrow or rearrange without losing its integrity. Because intercalation in a living embryo is entangled with countless other biological processes, it has been hard to isolate the physical forces that actually drive a neighbour exchange.
Artur Ruppel, Vladimir Misiak and Martial Balland built a stripped-down in vitro assay using just four cells — the minimal system in which an intercalation event can happen. By controlling and measuring the mechanics directly, they show that the neighbour swap is governed by two competing ingredients: the tension along the junctions (interfaces) between cells, and the migratory forces the cells generate as they crawl. This minimal, quantitative platform turns a messy developmental process into a controllable physics experiment, clarifying how tissues physically remodel. The study is published in Nature Physics.
☀️ / 太陽嵐がTeV宇宙線を「曲げる」——LHAASOが、惑星間空間を通過するコロナ質量放出（ICME）によってTeV宇宙線の到来方向に一時的な大規模異方性が生じることを観測。高エネルギー宇宙線で太陽活動を測る新手法につながる（Z. Cao ら／LHAASO共同研究、Phys. Rev. Lett.掲載）
When the Sun launches a coronal mass ejection (CME), the magnetic cloud sweeping past Earth can scatter incoming cosmic rays and briefly lower their flux — the long-known Forbush decrease, well documented for relatively low-energy cosmic rays. At TeV energies, however, the particles are so rigid that they were expected to pass through such magnetic structures almost unaffected.
Using the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) in China — one of the world’s largest cosmic-ray detectors — the LHAASO Collaboration (Z. Cao et al.) reports a transient large-scale anisotropy in TeV cosmic rays caused by the interplanetary CME that hit Earth on 4 November 2021. The directional deficit was strongest just before the magnetic “flux rope” arrived, which the team attributes to enhanced scattering in the turbulent sheath region ahead of the ejecta. Because the high-energy cosmic-ray signal effectively maps the internal magnetic structure of the storm, the result points to a new way to probe — and potentially help forecast — solar storms and their effects on satellites and power grids. Published in Physical Review Letters and highlighted by APS Physics.
An atom coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide almost perfectly reflects a weak resonant drive, and the small transmitted field is strongly bunched — photons tend to arrive together. What happens when many such atoms are lined up along the waveguide had not been worked out exactly.
Zeidan Zeidan, Therese Karmstrand, Maryam Khanahmadi and Göran Johansson (Chalmers University of Technology, with RIKEN in Saitama, Japan) derive exact analytical results for N two-level atoms separated by the drive wavelength. Increasing the number of atoms suppresses transmission while strongly enhancing photon bunching: the transmission becomes a predominantly incoherent, superbunched (N+1)-photon scattering process that can occur only when all N atoms are collectively excited. The first transmitted photon therefore heralds a fully excited atomic array, enabling heralded multi-photon state generation for long-distance entanglement and quantum metrology. Published in Physical Review Letters (preprint arXiv:2506.05147).
Ordinarily, a magnetic field weakens and destroys superconductivity: turn the field up high enough and the superconducting state disappears. In a few exotic materials, however, cranking the field even higher makes superconductivity return — so-called reentrant superconductivity. Until now this counterintuitive effect had been seen only in special three-dimensional bulk crystals, never at an engineered interface or thin film.
A RIKEN-led international team — Denis Maryenko, group director Masashi Kawasaki and team director Minoru Kawamura of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) — found reentrant superconductivity in the two-dimensional electron system that forms at the interface of an LaTiO₃/KTaO₃ oxide heterostructure. In their epitaxially grown artificial interface, cooled to very low temperature, superconductivity vanished as the magnetic field rose but reappeared above roughly 1 tesla, and the effect stayed robust over a wide range of temperatures while the interface’s electron density was tuned with a back-gate voltage. Because this oxide interface is electrically controllable and can be built into multilayer structures, it provides a versatile new platform for studying superconductivity under magnetic fields and for future quantum devices. Published as a RIKEN press release.
In many transition-metal oxides an extra electron does not move freely; instead it locally distorts the surrounding lattice and drags that distortion along with it, forming a quasiparticle called a polaron. When the distortion is set by the Jahn–Teller effect (a symmetry-lowering deformation that splits electronic orbitals), the result is a Jahn–Teller polaron. These objects strongly influence a material’s electrical, structural and magnetic behaviour, but catching them forming in real time has been elusive because it requires fingerprints of a fleeting, local symmetry reduction.
An international team including Simone Restelli and colleagues (with physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN)) demonstrate Jahn–Teller polaron formation in the spinel Co₃O₄ using state-selective ultrafast laser excitation. By targeting specific electronic transitions and watching the resulting coherent lattice modes, they show that ligand-to-metal charge transfer triggers the polaron, while on-site d–d transitions launch a coherent T2g phonon. Because the polaron is created and steered with tailored light pulses, cobalt oxide becomes a promising platform for ultrafast spintronics and light-controlled material properties. The work is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Simone Restelliらと、ポーランド科学アカデミー核物理学研究所（IFJ PAN）の物理学者らを含む国際チームは、状態選択的な超高速レーザー励起を用いて、スピネル型のCo₃O₄中でヤーン－テラーポーラロンの生成を実証した。特定の電子遷移を狙って生じるコヒーレントな格子振動を追うことで、配位子から金属への電荷移動がポーラロンを引き起こし、サイト上のd－d遷移がコヒーレントなT2gフォノンを励起することを示した。ポーラロンを設計された光パルスで生成・制御できるため、酸化コバルトは超高速スピントロニクスや光制御物性の有望な舞台となる。成果はJournal of the American Chemical Societyに掲載された。
A permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) of a subatomic particle would mean its positive and negative charge are slightly offset along its spin axis. The Standard Model predicts EDMs far too small to detect, so any measurable value would signal new physics and an extra source of CP violation — the matter–antimatter imbalance that lets the Universe contain more matter than antimatter. The deuteron (the nucleus of “heavy hydrogen,” a bound proton–neutron pair) is a particularly clean place to look.
The JEDI Collaboration used the COSY (Cooler Synchrotron) storage ring to determine the invariant spin axis of stored deuterons, combining a radio-frequency Wien filter, a superconducting Siberian snake and an electron-cooler solenoid. The measured tilts of a few milliradians were dominated by systematic effects, yielding the first experimental limit on the deuteron EDM, |dd| < 2.5 × 10−17e·cm (95% C.L.). Finding no asymmetry is consistent with conventional particle physics, but the bound narrows the space for beyond-Standard-Model CP violation and pioneers storage-ring EDM searches for charged particles. The result is reported in Physical Review Letters (published 16 June 2026) and highlighted in Nature.
A superfluid flows without friction, and when it rotates its angular momentum is quantized — it can only take discrete values set by quantum mechanics. In gases of paired fermions (such as ultracold lithium atoms), the way pairs form changes smoothly across the BEC–BCS crossover, from tightly bound molecules (a Bose–Einstein condensate) to loosely correlated Cooper pairs (as in superconductors). How this microscopic pairing connects to the large-scale rotating flow has been hard to measure directly.
A team including M. Frómeta Fernández, D. Hernández-Rajkov and G. Roati built a matter-wave analogue of the Sagnac interferometer — the device behind optical gyroscopes — but using phonons (quantized sound waves) travelling around a ring-shaped superfluid instead of light. By reading the phase shift that rotation imprints on counter-propagating phonons, they directly measured the angular momentum per particle across the whole BEC–BCS crossover, giving a clean experimental link between fermionic pairing and macroscopic superflow. The work is published in Nature Physics.
Whether a magnet’s spins behave in a three-dimensional or essentially two-dimensional way — and whether they are best described by the Heisenberg model (spins free to point in any direction) or the Ising model (spins restricted to two directions) — depends on the material’s dimensionality and its magnetic anisotropy. In atomically thin van der Waals magnets, controlling this character is key to designing spintronic devices.
Working with the van der Waals ferromagnet Fe₃GeTe₂, Ke Xiao, Ruifeng Wang, Stuart S. P. Parkin and colleagues showed that self-intercalation — inserting additional iron atoms into the gaps between the layers — drives an anomalous crossover from 3D Heisenberg to 2D Ising ferromagnetism. Tuning the amount of intercalated iron thus tunes the very nature of the magnetic order, offering a route to engineer low-dimensional magnetism on demand. The study appears in Nature Physics.
Ke Xiao、Ruifeng Wang、Stuart S. P. Parkinらは、ファンデルワールス強磁性体Fe₃GeTe₂を用い、層と層のすき間に余分な鉄原子を挿入する自己インターカレーションによって、3次元ハイゼンベルク型から2次元イジング型の強磁性への異常なクロスオーバーを引き起こせることを示した。挿入する鉄の量を調整することで磁気秩序そのものの性質を制御でき、低次元磁性を思いどおりに設計する道筋となる。成果はNature Physicsに掲載された。
Topological materials have electronic states protected by the global “shape” of their energy bands, giving them robust conducting surfaces and other unusual properties. Floquet engineering is the idea that shining intense, periodic light on an ordinary material could temporarily rewrite its band structure and switch on such topology — but clear experimental evidence in a real semiconductor has been lacking.
F. Chassot, A. Pulkkinen, C. Monney and colleagues studied tin telluride (SnTe), which is topologically trivial in its normal state. Using femtosecond laser pulses and time-resolved photoemission, they observed that the light briefly induces a band inversion, creating a transient topological state that vanishes once the pulse is gone. The result is direct evidence that light-driven Floquet engineering can turn topology on and off in a semiconductor. The work is published in Nature Physics.
F. Chassot、A. Pulkkinen、C. Monneyらは、通常状態ではトポロジカルに自明なテルル化スズ（SnTe）を調べた。フェムト秒レーザーパルスと時間分解光電子分光を用い、光が一瞬バンド反転を引き起こして過渡的なトポロジカル状態を生み、パルスが去ると消えることを観測した。光駆動のフロケ・エンジニアリングが半導体のトポロジーをオン・オフできることを直接示した結果である。成果はNature Physicsに掲載された。
Keywords: Floquet engineering, フロケ・エンジニアリング, topological state, トポロジカル状態, SnTe, tin telluride, テルル化スズ, band inversion, バンド反転, light-driven
💧 — Simulations support a two-state picture of liquid water: large-scale molecular dynamics show liquid water continually interconverting between a denser, more disordered local structure and a less dense, more ordered one — helping explain anomalies such as water reaching maximum density at 4°C (Liwen Li, Jie Zhong et al., Nature Physics) / シミュレーションが支持する液体の水の「二状態」描像——大規模分子動力学計算により、液体の水が、密度が高く乱れた局所構造と、密度が低く秩序だった局所構造の間を絶えず行き来していることが示された。4°Cで密度が最大になるなど水の異常な性質の説明につながる（Liwen Li, Jie Zhong ら、Nature Physics掲載）
Liquid water looks simple, but it hides dozens of anomalies — most famously that it reaches its maximum density at about 4°C and becomes easier to compress as it is cooled. For decades, one popular explanation has been the two-state model: the idea that liquid water is not a single uniform substance but a fluctuating mixture of two interconvertible local structures — a denser, more disordered arrangement and a less dense, more ordered (more ice-like) one.
In a study published in Nature Physics, Liwen Li, Jie Zhong and colleagues use large-scale molecular-dynamics simulations to provide fresh molecular-level evidence that these two local structures genuinely coexist and continuously interconvert throughout ordinary liquid water — not only in the hard-to-reach deeply supercooled regime. The work strengthens the case that water's many anomalies arise from the competition between these two structural motifs, rather than treating the two-state behaviour as a special feature of extreme conditions.
Strongly interacting quantum particles underlie some of the richest phenomena in physics — magnetism, superconductivity, topological states — yet their many-body complexity makes them hard to understand and to engineer on demand.
A team from the University of Innsbruck and Turin proposed a tunable theoretical framework based on ultracold magnetic lanthanide atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice, described by a 1D t–J model. Within it they predict seven distinct strongly-correlated quantum phases, including topological superconductivity. Crucially, the proposed platform is directly compatible with existing experimental setups, and topological superconductors are among the most promising routes to fault-tolerant quantum computing. Published (open access) in Nature Communications.
🕳️ — Loudest gravitational wave probes a black hole's event-horizon region for the first time: by re-analysing GW250114 — the strongest binary-black-hole signal recorded to date — a team isolates previously unresolved "direct waves" near the merger, measuring the remnant black hole's rotation frequency and surface gravity and opening a new test of general relativity in the strong-field regime (Australian National University / OzGrav, with collaborators in Canada, the U.S. and Spain, Nature) / 史上最大級の重力波が、ブラックホールの「事象の地平面」近傍を初めて探る——観測史上最も強い連星ブラックホール信号GW250114を精密に再解析し、合体直前のこれまで分解できなかった「直接波（direct waves）」を切り出すことで、残された新しいブラックホールの自転周波数と表面重力を測定。強重力場における一般相対論の新しい検証への道を開いた（オーストラリア国立大学／OzGrav、カナダ・米国・スペインの共同研究者、Nature掲載）
A black hole's event horizon — the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape — sits exactly where Einstein's general relativity and quantum theory are expected to meet, yet it has been almost impossible to observe directly. When two black holes merge they emit gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime detected on Earth by the twin LIGO observatories. The signal GW250114, recorded in 2025, is the loudest binary-black-hole event ever heard — about three times louder than the first detection a decade ago — making it a uniquely powerful natural laboratory.
A team led by Dr. Ling Sun and Ph.D. candidate Neil Lu at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and the Australian National University, with colleagues in Canada, the United States and Spain, developed a new way to decode the signal. Within the "sound" of the crash they isolated a small, previously poorly understood component called direct waves, which carry information from very close to the horizon. From it they extracted two fundamental properties of the newly formed black hole — its rotation frequency and surface gravity — providing a new observational window onto the event-horizon region and a first step toward future strong-field tests of general relativity. The work is published in Nature.
Keywords: GW250114, gravitational waves, 重力波, event horizon, 事象の地平面, black hole merger, ブラックホール合体, binary black hole, 連星ブラックホール, direct waves
⏳ — Robust "space-time crystals" created in ordinary room-temperature liquid crystals: under steady, constant-intensity light a chiral liquid crystal spontaneously forms particle-like solitons that loop endlessly in both space and time and move like Majorana-type quasiparticles, staying stable for over 24 hours and tolerating ~20% timing disruption — bringing time-crystal physics out of fragile near-absolute-zero quantum systems and into everyday soft matter (Hiroshima University & University of Colorado Boulder, Nature Communications) / 頑健な「時空間結晶」を、ありふれた室温の液晶で実現——強度一定の定常的な光のもとで、キラル液晶が空間と時間の双方で果てしなくループする粒子的なソリトンを自発的に形成し、マヨラナ型の準粒子のように運動。24時間以上安定で、駆動のタイミングを約20%乱しても壊れず、極低温の壊れやすい量子系に限られていた時間結晶の物理を、日常的なソフトマターの世界へ持ち込んだ（広島大学・コロラド大学ボルダー校、Nature Communications掲載）
Ordinary crystals such as salt or diamond repeat their pattern in space. A time crystal, first proposed by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012, instead repeats in time, with its components in perpetual, self-sustaining motion. Until now such states were thought to require highly complex, fragile quantum systems at near-absolute-zero temperatures, such as trapped ions or quantum simulators.
A team from Hiroshima University (WPI-SKCM²) and the University of Colorado Boulder, with first author Hanqing Zhao and Ivan I. Smalyukh, instead realised a classical space-time crystal in a room-temperature chiral liquid crystal driven by constant light. The emergent, particle-like solitons break symmetry in both space and time and move like Majorana-type quasiparticles. Remarkably, the structures stayed stable for more than 24 hours and survived deliberate disruption of the drive timing by up to 20%, showing that rich space-time symmetries are not confined to the quantum world. Because liquid crystals already underpin display technology, the authors suggest applications in reconfigurable optics such as beam steerers and laser elements. The work is published in Nature Communications.
広島大学（WPI-SKCM²）とコロラド大学ボルダー校のチーム（筆頭著者Hanqing Zhao、Ivan I. Smalyukh）は、一定の光で駆動した室温のキラル液晶の中に、古典的な時空間結晶を実現した。創発した粒子的なソリトンは空間と時間の双方で対称性を破り、マヨラナ型の準粒子のように運動する。注目すべきことに、この構造は24時間以上安定で、駆動タイミングを最大20%意図的に乱しても壊れなかった。豊かな時空間対称性が量子の世界だけのものではないことを示した成果である。液晶はすでに表示技術の基盤であるため、著者らはビーム偏向素子やレーザー素子など、再構成可能な光学デバイスへの応用を見込む。成果はNature Communicationsに掲載された。
Most cooling relies on moving a fluid or running a refrigerator, but light itself can in principle cool a solid: if a material re-emits photons carrying slightly more energy than it absorbs, the missing energy is taken from the material’s heat (its phonons). This optical cooling (laser refrigeration) usually demands near-perfect light-emission efficiency, which few materials achieve.
Jiamin Lin, Baixu Xiang, Weigao Xu and colleagues demonstrated optical cooling in stacked two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures, where laser light drives phonon-assisted charge transfer across the interface between the layers. Because the heat is removed through this interfacial process, cooling no longer requires the stringent quantum-efficiency conditions that have held the method back — pointing toward cryogen-free, on-chip thermal management for electronics and quantum devices. The work is published in Nature.
🌌 / 数十億光年にわたって伸びる宇宙構造の兆候が、「滑らかな宇宙」という前提に疑問を投げかける——パラメータに依らない統計量（対距離の角度分布）を用いた研究が、ギガパーセク規模でまとまった方向性をもつ（「異方的な」）構造の証拠を報告。最大スケールでは宇宙がどの方向にも同じに見えるとする宇宙原理と、緊張関係にある可能性がある（F. Sylos Labini & M. Galoppo、Nature掲載）
A cornerstone of modern cosmology, the cosmological principle, assumes that on sufficiently large scales the Universe is homogeneous (the same everywhere) and isotropic (the same in every direction). Most analyses assume this statistical isotropy sets in well below the size of the observable Universe.
Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo applied a parameter-free measure they call the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances to map directional correlations in the distribution of galaxies. They report evidence for coherent anisotropic structures extending over gigaparsec scales (billions of light-years) — larger than expected if the cosmos were statistically isotropic on those scales. If it holds up to independent checks, the finding would be in tension with the cosmological principle and could affect how cosmological parameters are inferred; like all such large-scale anisotropy claims, it will need confirmation with further data. The study is published in Nature.
Francesco Sylos LabiniとMarco Galoppoは、「対距離の角度分布（Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances）」と呼ぶパラメータに依らない指標を銀河分布に適用し、方向ごとの相関を調べた。その結果、ギガパーセク規模（数十億光年）にわたって広がる、まとまった異方的構造の証拠を報告した。これは、そのスケールで宇宙が統計的に等方であるとした場合の予想より大きい。独立な検証に耐えれば、この発見は宇宙原理と緊張関係に立ち、宇宙論パラメータの推定にも影響しうる。ただし、こうした大規模異方性の主張の常として、さらなるデータによる確認が必要である。成果はNatureに掲載された。
A ring laser gyroscope measures rotation by sending two laser beams in opposite directions around a loop and watching how rotation shifts their frequencies (the Sagnac effect). But at very slow rotation the two beams tend to “lock” together in frequency, creating a dead zone — the lock-in problem — that has long limited the smallest rotations these devices can sense. Conventional fixes add mechanical “dithering” or bulky external parts.
Yuan-Hao Mao, Ji-Peng Xu, Hui Jing and colleagues instead used spontaneous symmetry breaking in a helium–neon ring laser to make the two directions intrinsically different — a kind of built-in chirality. This eliminates lock-in and lets the gyroscope measure rotation accurately right down to near zero, without external components, improving both miniaturization and precision. The work is published in Nature.
☀️ / 太陽嵐の磁気雲が、地球へ向かう途中で「超膨張」した——わずか0.14 AUしか離れていない2機の探査機（ソーラー・オービターとWind）で追跡したところ、コロナ質量放出（CME）の磁気雲が約 21%膨らみ、プラズマ温度がおよそ3倍に上昇。距離にしてわずか約 2100万kmの間の出来事で、宇宙天気モデルが想定するよりはるかに劇的で急速な成長だった（アイオワ大学、Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society掲載）
When the Sun erupts in a coronal mass ejection (CME), it flings out a bubble of magnetized plasma — a magnetic cloud — that can disturb satellites, navigation and power grids if it reaches Earth. Forecasters have generally assumed these clouds expand smoothly and predictably as they travel through the solar wind.
A team led by the University of Iowa (corresponding author Shirsh Lata Soni, with co-author David Miles, and colleagues at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and Amity University in India) caught the same magnetic cloud with two spacecraft — Solar Orbiter (0.84 AU) and Wind (0.98 AU) — separated by just 0.14 AU (about 21 million km). In that short span the cloud underwent a “super expansion,” growing about 21% and heating to roughly three times its plasma temperature, expanding at around 192 km s⁻¹ as it interacted with the surrounding solar wind. The rapid, non-uniform growth could change how space-weather impacts are predicted. The study appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
アイオワ大学を中心とするチーム（責任著者Shirsh Lata Soni、共著者David Miles、およびインドのヴィクラム・サラバイ宇宙センターとアミティ大学の研究者）は、同じ磁気雲を、わずか0.14 AU（約 2100万km）だけ離れた2機の探査機——ソーラー・オービター（0.84 AU）とWind（0.98 AU）——で捕らえた。この短い区間で雲は「超膨張（super expansion）」を起こし、約21%膨らんで、プラズマ温度はおよそ3倍に上昇。周囲の太陽風と相互作用しながら約 192 km/sで膨張していた。この急速で一様でない成長は、宇宙天気の影響を予測する手法を変えうる。成果はMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyに掲載された。
Strongly disordered superconductors (SDSCs) — thin films such as InOx, TiN, NbN and granular aluminium — are widely used in qubits, microwave resonators and photon detectors, where coherence times are limited by low-temperature microwave dissipation. The standard Mattis–Bardeen theory fails here because the single-particle spectrum shows a hard pseudogap.
Anton V. Khvalyuk and Mikhail V. Feigel’man developed a microscopic theory showing that low-frequency dissipation is dominated by a new type of bulk localized collective mode arising from the spatial inhomogeneity of the superconducting state. Rare “weak spots” host localized modes — low-energy rearrangements of Cooper pairs whose electric dipole is set by the weak-spot size rather than by pair breaking — producing a dissipative response with a two-level-system-like tanh(ℏω/2T) factor. The picture turns microwave spectroscopy into a probe of the order-parameter distribution and suggests a fresh strategy to extend coherence times in superconducting quantum devices. Published in Physical Review Letters.
Anton V. Khvalyuk と Mikhail V. Feigel’man は、低周波のマイクロ波損失が、超伝導状態の空間的な不均一性から生じる新種の「バルク局在型集団励起モード」によって支配されることを微視的理論で示した。まれな「弱いスポット」には、クーパー対の低エネルギーな組み替えに対応する局在モードが宿り、その電気双極子は対破壊ではなく弱いスポットの大きさで決まる。これが2準位系（TLS）に似たtanh(ℏω/2T)因子を持つ散逸応答を生む。この描像はマイクロ波分光を秩序変数分布のプローブに変え、超伝導量子デバイスのコヒーレンス時間を延ばす新戦略を示唆する。Physical Review Letters掲載。
🛰️ — Quantum teleportation beats direct single-photon transmission over a lossy channel for the first time: using event-ready entangled photons, a USTC team achieves an 82% heralding efficiency through 15 dB of loss and a 2.95× transmission-efficiency advantage, establishing an unconditional teleportational advantage (USTC / Hefei, Jian-Wei Pan group, Nature Physics) / 量子テレポーテーションが、損失のある通信路で単一光子を「直接送る」より初めて有利に——「イベント・レディ」なもつれ光子を用い、15 dBの損失を通して82%のヘラルド効率と2.95倍の伝送効率優位を達成し、無条件のテレポーテーション優位性を実証（中国科学技術大学・合肥／潘建偉グループ、Nature Physics掲載）
Photon loss is the central obstacle in quantum communication: over a long or lossy optical channel, only a tiny fraction of directly transmitted photons survive, throttling applications such as loophole-free Bell tests and device-independent quantum key distribution. Quantum teleportation offers a "disembodied" alternative — it transfers a photon's quantum state through a virtual channel of pre-shared entanglement plus classical communication, so in principle the state can arrive even when the photon itself would have been lost. Yet experimentally, no previous single-photon teleportation had ever shown a higher survival probability than simply sending the photon directly.
A team led by Jian-Wei Pan, Chao-Yang Lu and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) overcame this by first proposing and demonstrating an all-optical scheme for remote preparation of event-ready entangled photons. Through an effective 15 dB channel loss they reached an 82% heralding efficiency for the entangled pairs, and — using that pre-distributed entanglement — measured a 2.95-fold enhancement in transmission efficiency compared with direct transmission through the same channel, establishing an unconditional teleportational advantage for single photons. The result is a concrete step toward loss-tolerant quantum networks and a future quantum internet.
🧭 — A diamond defect could detect a brand-new kind of magnetism: physicists propose using a nitrogen–vacancy (NV) center in diamond to identify altermagnets — a recently discovered third class of magnet — by reading the direction-dependent relaxation of the defect's spin near a candidate material (University at Buffalo / JGU Mainz / Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / ダイヤモンドの“傷”が全く新しい磁性を見つけ出す——窒素−空孔（NV）中心を用い、候補物質のそばでスピンの緩和が方向によって変わる様子を読み取ることで、近年見つかった第3の磁石「アルターマグネット（altermagnet）」を同定する量子センシング手法を提案（バッファロー大学／マインツ大学／マックス・プランク複雑系物理学研究所、Physical Review Letters掲載・理論研究）
For roughly a century, magnets came in two basic kinds — ferromagnets, whose electron spins line up to produce an external field, and antiferromagnets, whose spins cancel out. Within the last decade theorists identified a third category, the altermagnet, in which a special arrangement of rotated atoms and alternating spins combines the fast switching of antiferromagnets with electronic properties useful for spintronics. More than 200 materials are predicted to be altermagnets, but confirming the class in any given material remains experimentally difficult.
A team led by Jamir Marino at the University at Buffalo, together with Libor Šmejkal and Jairo Sinova (who first proposed altermagnetism) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and a collaborator at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, proposes a minimally invasive quantum-sensing test. A nitrogen–vacancy (NV) center — a single atomic defect in diamond that is exquisitely sensitive to nearby magnetism — is placed beside a suspected altermagnet, and its spin is rotated and allowed to relax in different directions. Direction-dependent relaxation would betray the telltale spin texture of an altermagnet. The scheme so far exists only in theory and awaits experimental realization, but it could become a building block for confirming — and ultimately exploiting — these materials in low-power electronics.
🌀 — A two-century-old light trick generates stable "optical skyrmions": by shining a laser on a small circular disk, NTU Singapore researchers use the classic Poisson (Arago) spot to create tiny swirling topological textures of light — producing spin, Stokes, electric-field and magnetic-field skyrmions all at once, with a far simpler setup than engineered metamaterials (Nanyang Technological University, Optica) / 約200年前から知られる光のいたずらが、安定な「光のスカーミオン」を生む——小さな円板にレーザーを当てるだけで、古典的な「ポアソンの輝点（アラゴの斑点）」を用いて光の微小な渦状トポロジカル構造を生成。スピン・ストークス・電場・磁場の4種のスカーミオンを同時に作り出し、従来の人工メタマテリアルよりはるかに簡単な構成を実現（南洋理工大学、Optica掲載）
Skyrmions are tiny, swirling, knot-like configurations — in light they appear as miniature topological textures, "akin to the spikes of a hedgehog." They are a hot research topic because their stability could be harnessed for future data storage and communications. Until now, generating optical skyrmions typically required complex and costly engineered materials such as metasurfaces.
A team led by Assistant Professor Shen Yijie at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore showed a much simpler route: directing a laser at a small circular disk to exploit the Poisson spot (also called the Arago spot), a bright point that appears in the centre of a circular shadow — a phenomenon known since the early 19th century. The resulting light field hosts up to four kinds of skyrmions at once — spin, Stokes, electric-field and magnetic-field skyrmions — letting researchers study how different optical skyrmions form and interact within a single beam. The work is published in Optica.
🔆 — Solid material turns ordinary sunlight into high-energy UV: a Kyushu University team builds a sterically protected molecular solid that "adds together" the energy of two visible-light photons (triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion) to emit one ultraviolet photon under ordinary outdoor sunlight, reaching 1.9% conversion efficiency — a milestone for solar-energy harvesting, UV curing and air purification (Kyushu University, Nature Communications) / 固体材料が、ありふれた太陽光を高エネルギー紫外線へ——九州大学のチームが、立体的に保護したπ電子分子の固体を開発し、屋外の通常の太陽光のもとで2個の可視光光子のエネルギーを「足し合わせ」（三重項−三重項消滅アップコンバージョン）て1個の紫外光子を放出。変換効率1.9%を達成し、太陽光エネルギー利用・UV硬化・空気浄化への応用に向けた節目となった（九州大学、Nature Communications掲載）
In everyday life, energy does not simply add up — two cups of warm water do not make one cup of boiling water. But in the quantum world, multiple low-energy photons can combine into a single, higher-energy one, a process called photon upconversion. Ultraviolet (UV) light is indispensable for air purification, 3D-printing resin curing and dental fillings, yet it makes up only about 6% of the sunlight reaching Earth's surface, and converting abundant visible light into UV efficiently in a solid has been a long-standing challenge.
A team at Kyushu University developed a solid-state molecular material using sterically protected π-electron systems that performs triplet–triplet annihilation (TTA) upconversion, "upgrading" visible light into UV under ordinary outdoor sunlight intensity with a conversion efficiency of 1.9%. By taking the energy of two visible photons and fusing it into one ultraviolet photon in a stable solid, the work — described as the culmination of more than 14 years of research — points toward better use of the visible light we usually waste, for solar energy and UV-driven applications. It is published in Nature Communications.
Keywords: photon upconversion, 光アップコンバージョン, triplet-triplet annihilation, 三重項三重項消滅, TTA-UC, ultraviolet, 紫外線, visible light, 可視光, solar energy
🔺 — Strongest evidence yet for a hidden "loop-current" order in a kagome metal: using circular-dichroism ARPES, a KAIST-led team finds that the kagome superconductor CsV₃Sb₅ spontaneously breaks time-reversal symmetry as it cools — a long-predicted but elusive electronic state that may set the stage for its superconductivity (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nature Physics) / カゴメ金属に潜む「ループ電流」秩序の、これまでで最も強い証拠——円二色性ARPES（角度分解光電子分光）を用い、韓国KAIST中心のチームが、カゴメ超伝導体CsV₃Sb₅が冷却にともなって自発的に時間反転対称性を破ることを観測。長く予言されながら捉えにくかったこの電子状態は、超伝導への転移の舞台を整えている可能性がある（韓国科学技術院KAIST、Nature Physics掲載）
Kagome metals — named for a woven-basket lattice of corner-sharing triangles — are a playground for exotic quantum phenomena. Physicists have long suspected they host a subtle form of spontaneous symmetry breaking called loop-current order, in which microscopic currents circulate and break time-reversal symmetry. The effect had been predicted theoretically but was extremely hard to detect, because its signals are faint and easily masked by other states appearing at similar temperatures.
A team led by Yeongkwan Kim at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) studied the kagome superconductor CsV₃Sb₅ (caesium vanadium antimonide), which passes through several ordered states before becoming superconducting at low temperature. By probing it with circularly polarized light in a circular-dichroism ARPES (angle-resolved photoemission) experiment, they obtained the strongest evidence yet for the broken-time-reversal loop-current phase. The result could shed new light on how these materials transition into superconductivity. It is published in Nature Physics.
A Josephson diode is a nonreciprocal quantum element — the superconducting analogue of the familiar semiconductor p–n junction diode — that lets a dissipationless supercurrent pass more easily in one direction than the other. It has been realized in solid-state devices, but remained relatively unexplored in atomtronic circuits.
Nalinikanta Pradhan, Rina Kanamoto, M. Bhattacharya and Pankaj Kumar Mishra propose — and numerically demonstrate — a Josephson diode effect in an atomtronic ring condensate: a Bose–Einstein condensate trapped in a loop, with optical barriers acting as Josephson junctions. Breaking inversion symmetry through asymmetric junction placement or an asymmetric alternating drive makes the critical current for one circulation direction differ from the other, yielding position- and drive-tunable diode efficiencies of up to 20% and 91%, respectively. Unlike solid-state platforms, the ultracold-atom system allows real-time, in situ and tunable control of junction geometry and the current–phase relation, and the authors also propose cavity optomechanics for nondestructive readout — a flexible blueprint for future neutral-atom quantum circuitry and atomtronic devices. Published as a Letter in Physical Review A.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reported something they had not expected: ionising ultraviolet light escaping from a galaxy that existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy, catalogued MXDFz4.4, sat at the end of the Era of Reionization; no previous detection of escaping ionising light lies this close to that era — the earlier record-holder existed when the Universe was about 1.6 billion years old.
The galaxy hosts tightly clustered young stars that produce ionising radiation strong enough to transform the opaque, neutral gas inside and immediately around the galaxy — clearing a path so that the ultraviolet light can travel outward rather than being absorbed. Whether ionising photons can actually leak out of early galaxies is the crux of the cosmic reionization problem: galaxies are the leading candidate for the sources that reionized the intergalactic medium, but only if a sufficient fraction of their ionising photons escapes. A direct detection of escaping UV at this epoch is therefore a rare and valuable data point. “Observing a galaxy like this was thought to be impossible,” said lead author Ilias Goovaerts (Space Telescope Science Institute, STScI). Published on 23 June 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal.
⚙️ — Next-generation collider passes an early test: Brookhaven National Laboratory reports the first successful run of the Electron-Ion Collider's new "common-platform" low-level radiofrequency (LLRF) electronics on a real accelerator cavity — the "brain" that will precisely steer the beams of the EIC, the machine being built to map how quarks and gluons build matter (DOE / Brookhaven National Laboratory) / 次世代加速器が初期試験に合格——ブルックヘブン国立研究所が、電子イオン衝突型加速器（EIC）向けに新開発した“共通プラットフォーム”方式の低レベル高周波（LLRF）制御エレクトロニクスを、実際の加速空洞で初めて動作させることに成功。これはビームを精密に制御する“頭脳”にあたり、クォークとグルーオンが物質を形づくる仕組みを描き出すために建設が進むEICの中核技術となる（米エネルギー省／ブルックヘブン国立研究所）
At the heart of every particle accelerator sit radiofrequency (RF) systems, which use electromagnetic waves to push particle beams close to the speed of light and keep them tightly bunched. The low-level RF (LLRF) electronics act as the control "brain," shaping those fields in real time so the beam stays stable and precise. For the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) — the next-generation U.S. nuclear-physics machine now being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory on the bones of the retired RHIC — the LLRF must be both extremely accurate and reproducible across many systems.
Brookhaven reports a key early milestone: the first successful test of newly built, "common-platform" LLRF electronics on a real accelerator cavity. The common platform is shared hardware and control software that lets different accelerator subsystems reuse the same electronics rather than building bespoke controls for each. Demonstrating it on an actual cavity validates a design that will be replicated throughout the EIC, which will collide polarized electrons with ions to image — with unprecedented sharpness — how quarks and the gluons binding them generate the mass and spin of protons and nuclei.
🧵 — String theory emerges “almost inevitably” from a handful of physical assumptions: a “bootstrap” shows that the minimally consistent high-energy four-point scattering amplitudes collapse uniquely onto string theory’s Veneziano and Virasoro–Shapiro amplitudes (Cheung, Remmen, Sciotti & Tarquini; Caltech / NYU / IFAE Barcelona, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 弦理論は“ほぼ必然的”に導かれる——高エネルギー散乱についてのわずかな物理的仮定から出発する「ブートストラップ」により、最小限に無矛盾な4点散乱振幅が弦理論のヴェネツィアーノ振幅・ヴィラソロ＝シャピロ振幅へ一意に収束することを示す（カリフォルニア工科大／ニューヨーク大／バルセロナIFAE、Physical Review Letters掲載）
String theory has been studied for more than 50 years as a leading candidate for a “theory of everything,” yet a basic question lingered: is it an arbitrary mathematical construction, or is it singled out by physical principles? A new study takes a “bootstrap” approach — starting from a few minimal, physically reasonable assumptions about how particles scatter at high energy, and asking which scattering amplitudes are even allowed by consistency.
Clifford Cheung (Caltech), Grant N. Remmen (New York University), Francesco Sciotti and Michele Tarquini (IFAE Barcelona) show that consistency alone forces every tree-level four-point amplitude to have vanishing residues at prescribed values of the momentum transfer. Assuming “ultrasoft” high-energy behavior, the space of minimally consistent amplitudes — those whose residues exhibit these mandated zeros and nothing more — collapses uniquely onto the celebrated Veneziano and Virasoro–Shapiro amplitudes of string theory; similar logic extends to five-point scattering. “The strings just fell out,” Cheung said. In other words, string-like scattering may be an almost inevitable consequence of a few simple rules, rather than a special assumption — published in Physical Review Letters and highlighted in an APS Physics Viewpoint.
⚛️ — Multiple chiral spin-2 neutral excitations seen in the fractional quantum Hall effect provide evidence for the “parton” description — a follow-up to the 2024 discovery of “chiral graviton” modes that further links quantum-Hall liquids to the physics of gravity (Yang, Wang & Du, Nature Physics) / 分数量子ホール効果で複数のカイラル・スピン2中性励起を観測し、「パートン（parton）」描像を裏づける——2024年の「カイラル・グラビトン」モード発見の続編で、量子ホール液体と重力の物理とのつながりをさらに深める（Yang・Wang・杜、Nature Physics掲載）
In the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect, electrons confined to two dimensions in a strong magnetic field form exotic incompressible quantum liquids. Beyond their charged quasiparticles, these liquids host neutral collective excitations. A “quantum geometry” picture predicts chiral spin-2 modes that behave like condensed-matter analogues of the graviton — the hypothetical spin-2 quantum of gravity. In 2024 a team including Lingjie Du reported the first experimental evidence for such chiral graviton modes at filling factor ν = 1/3.
Now, writing in Nature Physics, Zihao Yang, Yifan Wang and Lingjie Du report observing multiple chiral spin-2 neutral excitations across FQH states. The number and structure of these modes match the predictions of the “parton” construction — a theoretical scheme in which an electron is imagined as built from fictitious sub-particles (“partons”). The result provides experimental support for the parton description of the quantum Hall effect and deepens the surprising bridge between FQH liquids and the physics of gravity and quantum geometry.
⚛️ — Standard models of electrons in "warm dense matter" turn out to be inaccurate: angle-resolved femtosecond X-ray Thomson scattering at the European XFEL shows that the widely used uniform-electron-gas description overestimates the plasmon resonance in shock-compressed aluminium by up to 8 eV, and that ab initio methods are needed for reliable diagnostics — with implications for planetary interiors, materials science and inertial-fusion research (European XFEL, HZDR & Rostock University, Physical Review Letters) / 「ワーム・デンス・マター（高温高密度物質）」中の電子をめぐる標準的モデルが、不正確だと判明——欧州XFELでの角度分解フェムト秒X線トムソン散乱により、広く使われてきた一様電子ガス模型が衝撃圧縮アルミニウムのプラズモン共鳴を最大8 eVも過大評価し、信頼できる診断には第一原理計算が必要だと示された。惑星内部・材料科学・慣性核融合の研究に影響する成果（欧州XFEL・HZDR・ロストック大学、Physical Review Letters掲載）
Warm dense matter (WDM) is an exotic state that is too hot to treat as ordinary condensed matter, yet too dense to treat as a weakly coupled plasma. It is central to understanding planetary interiors, materials under extreme conditions, and inertial-confinement fusion. In WDM the electron density oscillates collectively as plasmons, which can be read out with X-rays via X-ray Thomson scattering (XRTS) — but interpreting those spectra relies on models of how electrons respond.
Researchers at the European XFEL, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Rostock University and partners used high-precision angle-resolved femtosecond XRTS on shock-compressed aluminium (about 50 GPa) over a wide range of scattering wave vectors. They found that the de-facto-standard uniform-electron-gas models overestimate the plasmon resonance energy by up to 8 eV, while ab initio calculations that account for shock-induced disorder agree with experiment. Because these models are used to infer opacity, conductivity and energy transport, the result implies that reliable WDM diagnostics require first-principles treatments. It is published in Physical Review Letters.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have switched on NASA’s newly upgraded Cold Atom Lab (CAL), the minifridge-sized facility operated remotely by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. CAL chills rubidium and potassium atoms to just above absolute zero (below −459 °F, about −273 °C), where they merge into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) — a “fifth state of matter” whose wave nature dominates. In the microgravity of low Earth orbit these matter waves grow larger and can be observed for longer than on Earth.
The upgraded science module launched on April 11 on a Commercial Resupply Services mission (NG-24, the final scheduled hardware delivery for CAL) and was installed by astronaut Jessica Meir on May 8. According to NASA, the new SM-3X module collects more atoms, allows quantum gas clouds to be shaped with greater flexibility, and can create BECs about five times larger than previous modules, while the HXM-1 module upgrades the magnetic-control electronics. The facility currently supports five international research teams pursuing tests of Einstein’s equivalence principle, atom interferometry, and questions about dark matter and dark energy. “We’re performing quantum 2.0 — direct manipulation of large quantum states,” said JPL deputy project scientist Ethan Elliott.
How do the biggest galaxies and their central supermassive black holes assemble in the early Universe? To find out, an international team led by Leiden University and the University of Oxford pointed the James Webb Space Telescope — together with high-resolution radio imaging — at TGSSJ1530+1049, a radio galaxy at redshift z = 4, more than 12 billion light-years away. We see it as it was when the Universe was only about 1.5 billion years old.
Earlier radio observations had hinted at an active supermassive black hole; the new JWST data revealed a far more complex scene. The team identified a compact group of at least six galaxies likely to merge into a single enormous system, with a growing supermassive black hole at its heart — effectively catching the simultaneous birth of a giant galaxy and its central black hole in the act. The findings appeared in The Open Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy & Astrophysics.
以前の電波観測は活動的な超大質量ブラックホールの存在を示唆していたが、新たなJWSTのデータははるかに複雑な姿を明らかにした。チームは、やがて一つの巨大系へ合体するとみられる少なくとも6個の銀河のコンパクトな集団と、その中心で成長する超大質量ブラックホールを同定——巨大銀河とその中心ブラックホールが同時に生まれつつある“現場”を捉えた。成果はThe Open Journal of AstrophysicsとAstronomy & Astrophysicsに掲載。
Keywords: James Webb Space Telescope, ジェイムズ・ウェッブ宇宙望遠鏡, JWST, supermassive black hole, 超大質量ブラックホール, radio galaxy, 電波銀河, TGSSJ1530+1049, galaxy merger, 銀河合体
[Feature article, not a new experimental result] Roughly 70% of the cosmos is dark energy and about 25% dark matter; neither emits, reflects nor absorbs light, and neither has been observed directly. Recent cosmological data hint that dark energy may be changing over time rather than being a fixed cosmological constant — which prompts an obvious follow-up question: might dark matter be changing too, and might the two be aspects of the same physics?
Quanta Magazine surveys the case for the dark dimension scenario, a proposal growing out of the string-theory swampland programme associated with Cumrun Vafa and his former student Georges Obied. The idea ties the observed smallness of dark energy to the existence of an extra spatial dimension that is far larger than the rest but still microscopic, and it makes dark matter a consequence of the same structure — giving a single framework in which the two dark components are linked. Obied stresses that the problem deserves attack from many directions at once — observational cosmology, particle physics and string theory — and that data will ultimately decide.
The geometry of quantum states underpins phenomena from electrical conductivity to superconductivity. Extending those ideas to non-Hermitian quantum mechanics — systems that exchange energy with their environment, as open and amplifying optical systems do — requires generalising the Berry phase, and much of the resulting geometry has stayed poorly understood.
Tomoki Ozawa (AIMR, Tohoku University) and Henning Schomerus (Lancaster University) analysed the geometric contribution to adiabatic amplification — the build-up of signal intensity as parameters are varied slowly — and identified when it becomes path-independent, a situation with no counterpart in ordinary quantum mechanics. When the system has certain symmetries such as reciprocity (signals propagating symmetrically in opposite directions), the amplification depends only on the ratio of the Petermann factors at the start and end points. The prediction was confirmed in numerical simulations of two physically realistic models. Because the Petermann factor is fundamentally important yet notoriously hard to measure, reading it off from amplification behaviour is a practical bonus. The team next aims at more complex parameter spaces and non-adiabatic processes involving non-Hermitian topological transitions. Featured as an AIMR research highlight on 22 June 2026 (underlying paper: Phys. Rev. Research7, 013173, 2025).
🔢 — Quantum mechanics may not need imaginary numbers after all: a physically motivated composition rule yields a real-number quantum theory that is experimentally indistinguishable from the standard complex one (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf / DLR, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 量子力学は「虚数」なしでも定式化できるかもしれない——物理的に妥当な“合成則”を採用すると、標準的な（複素数の）量子力学と実験的に区別できない“実数だけの量子力学”が構成できることを証明（デュッセルドルフ大学／ドイツ航空宇宙センターDLR、Physical Review Letters掲載）
Complex numbers — and the imaginary unit i — sit at the heart of standard quantum mechanics, from the Schrödinger equation to the structure of quantum states. Whether they are genuinely fundamental or merely convenient has been debated for nearly a century. A 2021 proposal seemed to settle the question: under certain postulates, no real-valued quantum theory could reproduce all predictions of the complex one, and two experiments backed that up. Now Pedro Barrios Hita and Dagmar Bruß at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), working with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), show that one of those postulates — about how composite systems are combined — was too restrictive.
Replacing it with a physically motivated alternative for system composition yields a whole class of theories formulated entirely with real numbers that are experimentally indistinguishable from standard quantum mechanics: both frameworks give identical predictions for every conceivable experiment. The result implies that imaginary numbers are not fundamentally necessary in quantum theory and can, in principle, be replaced by real-valued formulations — recasting i as a matter of mathematical convenience rather than physical necessity. (Independent real-valued formulations were also proposed in 2026 by groups in France and elsewhere.)
🌑 — Echo-mapping hints that supermassive black holes are wrapped in dark matter: applying reverberation mapping to 14 galaxies, a Virginia Tech study finds 5 where the enclosed mass grows outward faster than visible matter can explain (Sharma et al., Phys. Rev. D) / 「光のこだま」で超大質量ブラックホール周辺の暗黒物質を探る——残響マッピング（reverberation mapping）を14個の銀河に適用し、5例で“中心ブラックホールから離れるほど見える物質だけでは説明できない質量増加”の兆候を検出（バージニア工科大学・Sharmaら、Physical Review D掲載）
Dark matter outweighs ordinary matter by roughly five to one, yet it neither emits nor absorbs light and can only be inferred through gravity. Around a supermassive black hole — such as Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way — ordinary gas glows brightly as it spirals inward through a hot accretion disk, but any surrounding dark matter stays invisible even to instruments like the Event Horizon Telescope. Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Tech, and colleagues asked whether dark matter clustered around these black holes could nonetheless be weighed indirectly.
Their tool is reverberation mapping ("echo mapping"): as material falls in, the accretion disk brightens in a pulse; that light travels outward and is re-emitted, slightly later, by gas farther out. The delay — set by the speed of light — gives the distance to that gas, and the inferred mass profile can include the contribution of any dark matter. Applied to 14 galaxies, the method turned up 5 in which the enclosed mass rises with distance from the central black hole faster than the visible matter alone allows. The authors stress this is a proof of concept rather than a definitive detection, but it sketches a concrete path to weighing dark matter in the most extreme galactic environments.
用いたのは残響マッピング（reverberation mapping、光のこだま）である。物質が落ち込むと降着円盤がパルス状に明るくなり、その光が外側へ伝わって、少し遅れて外縁のガスから再放射される。この時間遅れは光速で決まるため、ガスまでの距離が分かり、そこから推定される質量分布には暗黒物質の寄与も含まれうる。14個の銀河に適用したところ、5例で「中心ブラックホールから離れるほど、見える物質だけでは説明できない速さで内包質量が増える」兆候が見つかった。著者らは、これは決定的な検出ではなく概念実証（proof of concept）だと強調するが、最も極端な銀河環境で暗黒物質を測る具体的な道筋を示している。
Keywords: dark matter, 暗黒物質, supermassive black hole, 超大質量ブラックホール, reverberation mapping, 残響マッピング, echo mapping, 光のこだま, Sagittarius A*, いて座A*
🌀 — Are there truly "free" constants in quantum gravity? A Kyushu University-led study shows that continuous parameters of a conformal field theory can arise from local operators within the theory itself — supporting Einstein's century-old claim that fundamental laws contain no freely adjustable numbers (Komatsu, Kusuki et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 量子重力に“本当に自由な定数”はあるのか——九州大学を中心とするチームが、共形場理論（CFT）の連続パラメータが外から自由に与える「ダイヤル」ではなく理論内部の局所演算子から生じうることを示し、「物理の基本法則に自由に選べる定数は存在しない」というアインシュタイン以来の主張を支持（Physical Review Letters掲載）
Einstein argued that the fundamental equations of physics should contain no freely adjustable parameters — every such quantity ought to emerge from physical processes rather than be inserted by hand. This expectation matters acutely for quantum gravity, whose governing equations are not supposed to harbour arbitrary external numbers. A study led by a researcher at Kyushu University with collaborators (incl. Shota Komatsu and Yuya Kusuki) now addresses this in the setting of conformal field theory (CFT) and exactly marginal operators — the operators that generate continuous families of CFTs.
The authors show that, under certain assumptions, the continuous parameters labelling such a family can be understood as arising from local operators within the theory itself, rather than as dials imposed from outside. Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, this supports the prediction that quantum gravity contains no freely chosen external parameters, speaking directly to a foundational question about what is and is not fundamental. The result currently applies to two-dimensional CFTs; extending it to more general cases is the next goal.
In some approaches to quantum gravity, time is not a built-in feature of the Universe. The Wheeler–DeWitt equation, for instance, describes the cosmos as a whole as a single, unchanging quantum state with no external clock — so any sense of “time” must somehow emerge from the internal relationships between the system’s parts. This “problem of time” has long lived in the most abstract corners of theoretical physics, seemingly beyond experimental reach.
Professor Giovanni Barontini of the University of Birmingham built a laboratory analogue: a hermetically closed quantum system of about 24,000 ultracold atoms, cooled to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, split by a laser-made barrier into an observed “bright” sector and a hidden “dark” one. As atoms shuttled between the two sectors, the changing distribution defined an internal, entropy-based “time” — a parameter that has a direction, orders events, and can speed up, slow down, or even halt when the distribution holds steady. The bright sector repeatedly expanded and contracted like a miniature Big-Bang/Big-Crunch cycle, and a Schrödinger-like dynamics could be written entirely in this “entropic time,” with predictions matching the data. It is the first controlled experimental evidence that time can be defined by changes within a system rather than by an external ticking clock, offering a lab test bed for ideas in quantum cosmology and quantum gravity. Published in Physical Review Research (11 June 2026).
Keywords: problem of time, 時間の問題, quantum gravity, 量子重力, Wheeler-DeWitt equation, ホイーラー・ドウィット方程式, emergent time, 創発する時間, entropic time, エントロピー的時間
💧 — Swimming upstream in a superfluid of light: above the critical velocity, a mobile optical impurity in a 2D quantum fluid of light moves against the flow, self-propelled by the periodic shedding of vortex–antivortex pairs (Sorbonne / Porto / Côte d'Azur / Paris-Saclay, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 「光の超流動体」の中で小さな物体が流れに逆らって上流へ動く——2次元の光の量子流体中で、臨界速度を超えると可動の光学的“不純物”が流れに逆らって上流へ移動。渦・反渦ペアを周期的に放出することで自己推進することを実験で観測（ソルボンヌ大学／ポルト大学／コートダジュール大学／パリ＝サクレー大学、Physical Review Letters掲載）
A superfluid flows without friction below a critical velocity, exerting zero drag on an obstacle; above that threshold, superfluidity breaks down and energy is dissipated into ripples and vortices. Researchers at Sorbonne University, the University of Porto, Côte d'Azur University and Paris-Saclay University (M. Baker-Rasooli, T. Aladjidi, P.-É. Larré, Q. Glorieux and colleagues) studied this in a paraxial superfluid of light: a 780 nm laser beam propagating through a 20 cm hot rubidium-87 vapor cell, where near-resonant nonlinearity makes the photons interact like a 2D quantum fluid, with a second laser beam acting as a mobile optical impurity.
Driving the impurity through the flow, the team observed a counter-intuitive effect above the superfluid critical velocity: instead of being swept downstream, the impurity moves upstream, against the current. Phase-resolved measurements show this self-propulsion coincides with the periodic nucleation of vortex–antivortex pairs shed downstream of the obstacle. The platform's unique tunability — interactions set by light intensity — makes fluids of light a powerful, controllable testbed for quantum many-body hydrodynamics and future photonic devices.
Keywords: superfluid of light, 光の超流動体, quantum fluid of light, 光の量子流体, paraxial fluid, 近軸流体, superfluidity, 超流動, critical velocity, 臨界速度
🔬 — Five distinct localization phases in one quantum system: using a programmable photonic platform, a SUSTech team realizes a 1D Floquet system hosting extended, localized and critical phases — showing localization physics is far richer than the textbook two-phase picture (Qin, Wang, Fan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 1つの量子系の中で5種類の局在相を観測——南方科技大学（SUSTech）のチームが、プログラム可能な光（フォトニック）プラットフォームを用いて、拡張相・局在相・臨界相などをもつ1次元フロケ系を実現。局在物理が教科書的な「2相」の描像よりはるかに豊かであることを示す（Physical Review Letters掲載）
In 1958, Philip Anderson made the foundational discovery that disorder can trap waves — Anderson localization — a phenomenon now central to both condensed-matter and wave physics. Conventionally, theory distinguishes just two localization phases: extended states that support transport, and localized states that suppress it (with critical states at the boundary). A team led by Yucheng Wang and Jingyun Fan at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, has now experimentally observed five distinct localization phases coexisting within a single quantum system.
Using an advanced, programmable photonic platform realizing a one-dimensional Floquet (periodically driven) system, the researchers map out a landscape that interleaves extended, localized and critical regimes far beyond the usual extended-vs-localized dichotomy. The work demonstrates that the structure of localization physics is substantially richer than long assumed, offering a clean, tunable testbed for mobility edges and quantum transport — with implications for designing materials and devices whose conduction can be switched between sharply different regimes.
🎚️ — Tuning a quantum light source by a twist: rotating one atomically thin layer of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) shifts a single-photon emitter's color by ~30 nm (~100 meV) at room temperature — a mechanical control knob for quantum emitters (Univ. of Technology Sydney / Univ. of Minnesota / Kyung Hee Univ., Science Advances) / ねじった六方晶窒化ホウ素（hBN）で微小な量子光源の発光色を制御——原子1層分のhBNを回転させるだけで、単一光子源の発光色（波長）を室温で約30 nm（約100 meV）シフト。量子光源を“ねじり”で制御する新しい操作法（シドニー工科大学／ミネソタ大学／慶熙大学校、Science Advances掲載）
Quantum emitters — tiny sources that emit single photons — are key building blocks for quantum computing, secure communication and ultrasensitive sensing. Scientists can create and study emitters embedded in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a layered 2D material, but controlling them on demand has been a major challenge. A team at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), with the University of Minnesota and Kyung Hee University (lead author Dr. Angus Gale), found a new control mechanism: mechanically twisting the top hBN layer relative to the one beneath it.
By stacking hBN flakes and adjusting the twist angle, the team shifted the emitted light's color and wavelength by roughly 30 nm — about 100 meV — at room temperature, for emitters identified with carbon-trimer color centers. Density-functional-theory calculations confirmed that the twist angle and stacking of the top layer strongly reshape the local environment of the embedded defects. Because emission wavelength must often be matched precisely to a target, this tunable, mechanical "dial" is a meaningful step toward deploying hBN single-photon sources in practical quantum technologies.
Keywords: hexagonal boron nitride, 六方晶窒化ホウ素, hBN, quantum emitter, 量子エミッター, single-photon emitter, 単一光子源, color center, 色中心, carbon trimer
🌌 — Why doesn't the vacuum blow up the universe? A Brown University study links the cosmological constant to quantum-Hall topology, suggesting Λ is locked into quantized, topologically protected values (Alexander, Bernardo & Hui, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / なぜ真空エネルギーで宇宙は“暴走膨張”しないのか——ブラウン大学の研究が、宇宙定数Λを量子ホール効果のトポロジーと結びつけ、Λがトポロジカルに保護された“量子化された値”に固定されうると示唆（Physical Review Letters掲載）
The cosmological constant problem is one of physics' deepest puzzles: naive quantum field theory predicts a vacuum energy roughly 10120 times larger than the tiny value astronomers actually measure from cosmic acceleration. Stephon Alexander, Heliudson Bernardo and Aaron Hui at Brown University approached it through the background-independent Wheeler–DeWitt quantization of general relativity, focusing on the Chern–Simons–Kodama (CSK) state — a proposed ground state of quantum gravity that generalizes the Hartle–Hawking and Vilenkin states.
They point out that the CSK state has a striking mathematical resemblance to the topological field theory behind the quantum Hall effect, where electrical conductance is locked to exact quantized values and protected from disorder by the system's topology. Treating gravity's topological θ-sectors by analogy, they find the cosmological constant Λ tied to the θ-parameter, so that Λ becomes quantized and topologically protected against perturbative graviton-loop corrections — much as Hall conductance is robust against impurities. If space-time carries this non-trivial topology, it could explain why Λ stays small and stable rather than ballooning. The authors caution that the idea addresses the gravitational side of the problem and remains an early, hypothetical step.
Keywords: cosmological constant, 宇宙定数, dark energy, ダークエネルギー, vacuum energy, 真空エネルギー, quantum gravity, 量子重力, quantum Hall effect, 量子ホール効果
🧲 — Switching graphene's magnetism with a voltage: by laying graphene on a magnetic material and engineering it into a superlattice, researchers electrically tune large spin signals — and even flip their sign near charge neutrality — without permanently altering the graphene, a step toward low-power spintronics (National Graphene Institute, Manchester / National University of Singapore, Nature Communications) / グラフェンの磁性を“電圧で”切り替える——グラフェンを磁性体の上に重ね、超格子（superlattice）に作り込むことで、グラフェン自体を恒久的に変えることなく大きなスピン信号を電気的に制御し、電荷中性点付近では符号の反転まで実現。低消費電力スピントロニクスへの一歩（マンチェスター大学・国立グラフェン研究所／シンガポール国立大学、Nature Communications掲載）
Spintronics aims to process information using the electron's spin rather than just its charge, promising faster and far more energy-efficient devices. Graphene is an attractive host because it conducts superbly and barely disturbs spins as they travel — but on its own it is non-magnetic, so getting controllable, switchable spin behavior out of it has been a challenge.
Researchers at the National Graphene Institute in Manchester, with the National University of Singapore, show in Nature Communications that placing graphene next to a magnetic material imprints magnetism on it through the proximity effect, without chemically changing the graphene. By combining this with a graphene superlattice and working at very low charge density, they obtained unusually large spin signals that can be tuned electrically — and even reverse sign near the charge-neutrality and superlattice-induced neutrality points, a signature of spin-dependent band splitting. Because the effect is switched by a gate voltage rather than baked in, it points toward reconfigurable, low-power spintronic components.
🧠 — [Speculative hypothesis] Does spacetime "remember"? The Quantum Memory Matrix (QMM) proposal treats spacetime as discrete Planck-scale cells that each store a quantum "imprint" of every interaction, and its authors argue this could address the black-hole information paradox and even mimic dark matter and dark energy — an ambitious but non-mainstream framework (Neukart, Marx & Vinokur; Leiden University / Terra Quantum, in Entropy and related papers) / 【速報・仮説段階】時空は“記憶”するのか——「量子記憶行列（Quantum Memory Matrix, QMM）」仮説は、時空をプランクスケールの離散的な“セル”の集まりとみなし、各セルがあらゆる相互作用の量子的な“痕跡（imprint）”を蓄えると考える。提唱者たちは、これがブラックホール情報パラドックスの解消に加え、暗黒物質や暗黒エネルギーの振る舞いまで再現しうると主張する。野心的だが、まだ主流ではない理論的枠組み（Neukart・Marx・Vinokur／ライデン大学・Terra Quantum、Entropy誌ほか）
Important caveat: this is a speculative, not-yet-mainstream proposal, not an established result — we include it because it drew wide attention in June 2026. The Quantum Memory Matrix (QMM) framework, developed by Florian Neukart, Eike Marx and Valerii Vinokur (Leiden University / Terra Quantum), starts from the black-hole information paradox: relativity says whatever falls into a black hole is lost, while quantum theory forbids information from ever being destroyed.
QMM's response is to treat spacetime itself as discrete, made of tiny Planck-scale "memory cells," each carrying a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Every interaction that passes through a cell leaves a reversible quantum imprint, so information is stored locally and can in principle be recovered — the authors frame this as a "geometry–information duality." In a series of papers they extend the idea from electromagnetism to the strong and weak forces and argue that residual imprint energy can resemble dark energy, while accumulated imprints can mimic cold dark matter. The framework is mathematically explicit, and its authors propose tests with cosmological surveys and quantum simulators — but it remains far outside the mainstream and unconfirmed, and mainstream physics already has well-developed (and very different) approaches to these same puzzles.
High-precision spectroscopy of simple atoms tests the theory of atomic energy levels and probes nuclear charge radii. Discrepancies between QED theory and measured helium ionization energies have kept the field alert to possible new physics.
K. Steinebach, J. C. J. Koelemeij, H. L. Bethlem and K. S. E. Eikema (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam / LaserLaB) measured an electronic transition in helium-4 to 48 Hz uncertainty (0.25 parts per trillion) — four times better than the previous best — using a Bose–Einstein condensate in a magic-wavelength optical dipole trap. A Doppler shift from condensate motion was suppressed by time-resolved ion detection, and the frequency was calibrated over a White Rabbit link to a remote active hydrogen-maser clock. Combined with an earlier helium-3 measurement and improved theory, this yields the most precise determination to date of the charge-radius difference between the helion (³He nucleus) and the alpha particle (⁴He nucleus). Published in Physical Review Letters.
K. Steinebach、J. C. J. Koelemeij、H. L. Bethlem、K. S. E. Eikema（アムステルダム自由大学／LaserLaB）は、マジック波長の光双極子トラップに閉じ込めたヘリウム4のボース・アインシュタイン凝縮体を用い、電子遷移を48 Hz（0.25兆分率）の不確かさで測定した——従来の最良値より4倍精密である。凝縮体の運動によるドップラーシフトを時間分解イオン検出で抑え、遠隔の能動的水素メーザー原子時計とWhite Rabbit回線で周波数を較正した。以前のヘリウム3の測定と改良した理論を合わせることで、ヘリオン（³Heの核）とアルファ粒子（⁴Heの核）の電荷半径差を史上最も精密に決定した。Physical Review Letters掲載。
🪢 — Macroscopic quantum entanglement in a centimeter-sized "strange metal": inelastic neutron scattering on a Ce₃Pd₂₀Si₆ crystal yields a quantum-Fisher-information signal implying collective behavior of at least nine entangled entities — the largest entanglement depth reported in any quantum material (TU Wien / Würzburg / Rice, Nature Physics) / センチメートルサイズの「奇妙な金属（ストレンジメタル）」結晶で高い量子もつれの兆候を検出——Ce₃Pd₂₀Si₆結晶の非弾性中性子散乱から得た「量子フィッシャー情報（QFI）」が、少なくとも9個のもつれた実体が集団的に振る舞っていることを示唆。これまで報告された量子材料で最大のもつれ深度（ウィーン工科大学／ヴュルツブルク大学／ライス大学、Nature Physics掲載）
Most quantum effects are seen only in tiny, well-isolated systems. Can a macroscopic object, made of an enormous number of particles, still reveal quantum behavior? A team at TU Wien with the University of Würzburg and Rice University (F. Mazza, S. Biswas, X. Yan and colleagues, incl. Prof. Silke Bühler-Paschen) answered this for a strange metal — a class of materials, including high-temperature superconductors, whose electrical resistivity rises linearly (not quadratically) with temperature. They synthesized a centimeter-sized crystal of the heavy-fermion compound Ce₃Pd₂₀Si₆ (cerium–palladium–silicon).
Probing it with inelastic neutron scattering at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble under millikelvin temperatures and a tuned magnetic field, they analyzed the response using quantum Fisher information (QFI) — a quantity (developed for this purpose by Peter Zoller and colleagues) that can witness entanglement in large many-body systems. The QFI rises in a scale-free way as temperature falls, implying that groups of at least nine quantum-entangled entities act collectively — direct evidence of multipartite entanglement in a visible solid, and the largest entanglement depth yet reported in a quantum material. The result links macroscopic entanglement to strange-metal transport and the "Kondo destruction" scenario, with potential relevance for quantum metrology.
🧩 — Programmable microwave cluster states from a Josephson metamaterial: a reconfigurable, scalable resource for continuous-variable (CV) quantum computing (INRiM, Italian National Metrology Institute) / ジョセフソン・メタマテリアルで“プログラム可能なマイクロ波クラスター状態”を生成——連続変数（CV）量子計算に向けた、再構成可能でスケールしやすいリソース（INRiM／イタリア国立計量研究所）
An Italian team at INRiM (Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica, Turin) — A. Alocco, A. Celotto, L. Callegaro, E. Enrico and colleagues — has demonstrated on-demand generation of multimode entangled microwave cluster states using a programmable Josephson Traveling-Wave Parametric Amplifier (JTWPA) operated in the three-wave-mixing regime. Cluster states are the key resource for measurement-based, continuous-variable (CV) quantum computing, which can scale beyond the limitations of qubit-based architectures.
By injecting a tailored, non-equidistant comb of pump tones from an arbitrary waveform generator, the team engineers frequency-specific nonlinear couplings between many microwave frequency modes, effectively sculpting an arbitrary cluster-state graph. The target topology is verified by frequency-resolved heterodyne detection of the quadrature nullifiers. Because the entanglement structure is set purely by the pump spectrum, the platform is reconfigurable on the fly, and the JTWPA's wide bandwidth and spatial homogeneity make it inherently scalable — a promising route toward superconducting CV quantum processors. Preprint arXiv:2507.22823.
🔥 — Watching electrons hand heat to ions inside superheated gold: a direct, model-independent measurement of electron–ion temperature exchange in warm dense matter (Univ. of Nevada Reno / Univ. of Warwick / SLAC / European XFEL) / 超加熱した金の中で、電子がイオンへ“熱を手渡す”様子を直接測定——高温高密度物質（ウォーム・デンス・マター）における電子・イオン間の温度のやり取りをモデル非依存で計測（ネバダ大学リノ校／ウォーリック大学／SLAC／欧州XFEL）
Building on their 2025 result that gold can be superheated to ~19,000 K (≈14× its melting point) while staying crystalline, the same international collaboration (Travis D. Griffin, Dirk O. Gericke, Thomas G. White and colleagues; University of Nevada, Reno; University of Warwick; SLAC; European XFEL; and partners) has now directly measured how energy flows between electrons and ions in this extreme state. Using milli-electronvolt-resolution inelastic X-ray scattering at SLAC's LCLS (Matter in Extreme Conditions endstation), they read the ion temperature straight from the Doppler broadening of the scattered X-rays — a model-independent "ion thermometer."
A laser first dumps energy into the electrons of a nanometre-thin gold foil; the X-ray probe then tracks, in time, how fast that energy is transferred to the heavier ions (electron–ion equilibration). The team finds significantly enhanced electron–ion coupling compared with weakly excited gold, placing new constraints on non-equilibrium energy transport in dense plasmas. This matters for modelling planetary cores, stellar interiors, and inertial-fusion targets, where electron and ion temperatures briefly differ. Follow-up to White et al., Nature 643, 950–954 (2025); the equilibration study appears in Nature Communications (2026).
金を結晶構造のまま約19,000 K（融点の約14倍）まで超加熱できるという2025年の成果に続き、同じ国際共同研究チーム（Travis D. Griffin、Dirk O. Gericke、Thomas G. Whiteら、ネバダ大学リノ校、ウォーリック大学、SLAC、欧州XFELほか）が今回、この極限状態で電子とイオンの間をエネルギーがどう流れるかを直接測定した。SLACのX線自由電子レーザーLCLS（MEC実験ステーション）でミリ電子ボルト分解能の非弾性X線散乱を行い、散乱X線のドップラー広がりからイオン温度を直接読み取る——モデルに依存しない“イオン温度計”である。
まずレーザーがナノメートル厚の金薄膜の電子にエネルギーを叩き込み、続くX線プローブが、そのエネルギーがより重いイオンへ移っていく速さ（電子・イオン平衡）を時間分解で追う。チームは、弱く励起した金に比べて電子・イオン結合が著しく増強されていることを見いだし、高密度プラズマ中の非平衡エネルギー輸送に新たな制約を与えた。これは、電子温度とイオン温度が一時的に食い違う惑星中心核・恒星内部・慣性核融合ターゲットのモデル化にとって重要である。White et al., Nature 643, 950–954 (2025) の後続研究で、平衡過程の論文は Nature Communications（2026年）に掲載。
🕯️ — François Englert, co-originator of the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism and 2013 Nobel laureate, dies at 93 (CERN / Université libre de Bruxelles) / ヒッグス機構（ブラウト＝アングレール＝ヒッグス機構）の共同提唱者で2013年ノーベル物理学賞受賞者のフランソワ・アングレール氏が93歳で死去（CERN／ブリュッセル自由大学ULB）
The Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert died on 18 June 2026 in Uccle, Brussels, at the age of 93, as confirmed by his university (the Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB) and CERN. In 1964, working with his close collaborator Robert Brout, Englert showed that the carriers of fundamental forces — gauge vector bosons — could acquire mass by interacting with a field permeating all of space, via spontaneous symmetry breaking. Peter Higgs reached essentially the same conclusion independently and added that the field must have an associated particle; Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble published a third paper the same year.
Now called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, this idea became a cornerstone of the electroweak theory and the Standard Model of particle physics. Its predicted particle, the Higgs boson, was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and the following year Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Higgs. (Brout had died in 2011 and so could not share the prize; Higgs died in 2024.) A Holocaust survivor who was hidden as a child during the German occupation of Belgium and later ennobled a baron, Englert remained engaged with theoretical physics — especially the problem of reconciling general relativity with quantum theory — throughout his life. CERN announced his passing "with great sadness."
Keywords: François Englert, フランソワ・アングレール, Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, ヒッグス機構, Robert Brout, ロベール・ブラウト, Peter Higgs, ピーター・ヒッグス, Higgs boson, ヒッグス粒子
⚡ — A “superconducting Berry curvature dipole” is predicted in noncentrosymmetric superconductors: a collective, gap-phase-sensitive effect that yields dissipationless nonreciprocal responses — including a supercurrent-induced dynamical Hall conductivity and a giant second-order nonlinearity (Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 非中心対称な超伝導体に「超伝導ベリー曲率双極子（BCD）」を予言——超伝導ギャップの位相に敏感な集団効果で、散逸のない非相互応答（超電流誘起の動的ホール伝導や巨大な2次非線形性）を生む（Physical Review Letters掲載）
The Berry curvature dipole (BCD) endows electrons in noncentrosymmetric metals with nonreciprocal responses — such as the nonlinear Hall effect — even when time-reversal symmetry holds. Traditionally it is viewed as a single-particle property tied to a Fermi surface, so it was expected to vanish once a metal becomes superconducting and its Fermi surface is gapped out.
Reporting in Physical Review Letters, theorists reveal a superconducting Berry curvature dipole that instead arises as a collective many-body phenomenon of the entire superconducting state. Strikingly, it is sensitive to the phase of the superconducting order parameter and encodes the broken centrosymmetry of the pairing — so it can even be proximity-induced in a neighboring centrosymmetric metal. It produces dissipationless nonreciprocal electromagnetic responses, including a supercurrent-induced dynamical Hall conductivity and a giant second-order nonlinearity far exceeding that of ordinary noncentrosymmetric metals. This makes such superconductors a platform for unconventional dissipationless responses and a novel diagnostic of the superconducting gap’s fine structure.
💫 — Seeing gluons in near-misses: at RHIC, even when two gold ions don't collide, the cloud of photons around one can probe the gluons inside the other. STAR finds a spin-driven "flipped" quantum-interference pattern in J/ψ → e⁺e⁻ photoproduction, sharpening a method to map gluons that previews the future Electron-Ion Collider (STAR Collaboration, Brookhaven, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / すれ違いざまにグルーオンを“見る”——RHICでは、2つの金イオンが衝突しなくても、一方をまとう光子の雲がもう一方の内部のグルーオンを探れる。STARはJ/ψ→e⁺e⁻光生成において、スピンが引き起こす“反転した”量子干渉パターンを観測し、グルーオン分布を描き出す手法を精密化。これは将来の電子イオン衝突型加速器（EIC）の先取りとなる（STAR共同実験、ブルックヘブン、Physical Review Letters掲載）
At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists usually study head-on smashups of atomic nuclei. But in ultraperipheral collisions, two gold ions streak past without touching — and the intense cloud of photons surrounding each fast-moving nucleus acts like an X-ray beam that can interact with the gluons binding the other nucleus together. Mapping those gluons is central to understanding where protons and neutrons get most of their mass and spin.
The STAR collaboration tracked the electron–positron "daughters" from J/ψ → e⁺e⁻ produced in these near-misses and, reporting in Physical Review Letters, found a spin-induced "flipped" quantum-interference pattern confirming that it is the decay products that drive the interference. Because the J/ψ is heavier and longer-lived than the light mesons used before, it yields sharper spatial resolution for imaging the gluon distribution inside gold nuclei. The result validates a key technique — and a key assumption — for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), the successor machine that will use virtual photons from electrons to image gluons with far greater precision.
Quantinuum has reported Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture, in Nature. Helios encodes qubits in barium-137 (¹³⁷Ba⁺) hyperfine states — a first — and achieves all-to-all connectivity (any qubit can be entangled with any other) by physically shuttling ions through a junction and a rotatable storage ring, separating storage from logic zones.
Averaged across the machine, the team reports infidelities of 2.5×10⁻⁵ for single-qubit gates, 7.9×10⁻⁴ for two-qubit gates, and ~3–5×10⁻⁴ for state preparation and measurement — none fundamentally limited. System-level benchmarks (mirror and binary randomized benchmarking, random circuit sampling) place Helios well beyond what today's supercomputers can simulate, while supporting the mid-circuit measurement and feedforward needed for quantum error correction. The result shows the QCCD approach can scale qubit count and connectivity together. Nature (2026); preprint arXiv:2511.05465.
🌀 — Turning a lattice of polar vortices into a diffraction grating for nanoscale strain waves (Nature Physics) / 極性渦（ポーラー・ボルテックス）の格子を“回折格子”に変えて、ナノスケールのひずみ波を発生・制御する（Nature Physics掲載）
Writing in Nature Physics, researchers show that a periodic array of polar vortices — swirling topological textures of electric polarization in a ferroelectric — can act as a diffraction grating for strain. When the structure is driven piezoelectrically (by an applied electric field), the vortex lattice launches and shapes coherent strain waves at the nanometre scale.
This gives a route to generate and steer acoustic/strain waves in materials at length scales far below conventional transducers, using the material's own topological order as the active element. Controlling waves at the nanoscale could feed into phonon engineering, nanoscale acoustics, and information transport in future low-power devices. "Nanoscale strain wave generation by a piezoelectric grating from polar vortices," Nature Physics (2026).
これは、従来のトランスデューサよりはるかに小さなスケールで、物質中の音響波／ひずみ波を、材料自身のトポロジカル秩序を能動素子として使って生成・操作する道を開く。ナノスケールで波を制御できれば、フォノン工学、ナノ音響、将来の低消費電力デバイスにおける情報輸送などにつながる可能性がある。"Nanoscale strain wave generation by a piezoelectric grating from polar vortices," Nature Physics（2026年）。
🔄 — Microscopic evidence for an “imaginary charge density wave” (loop-current order) in the kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅: NQR/NMR detects tiny internal magnetic fields from spontaneously circulating electron currents, breaking time-reversal symmetry well above the charge-order transition (Univ. of Tokyo / Kyoto Univ., Nature Physics) / カゴメ金属CsV₃Sb₅で「虚数電荷密度波（ループ電流秩序）」の微視的証拠——核四極共鳴（NQR）／NMRで、電子が自発的に周回して生じる微小な内部磁場を検出し、電荷秩序転移より高温側で時間反転対称が破れていることを示した（東京大学／京都大学、Nature Physics掲載）
Beyond superconductors and quantum-Hall systems, theory has long predicted a third route to dissipationless, ordered electron motion: chiral loop-current order, in which electrons spontaneously circulate in microscopic loops on the crystal lattice. Its mathematical fingerprint is an imaginary charge density wave (iCDW) — a charge order in which what becomes ordered is the flow of electrons rather than their density. Whether it truly exists in the kagome metals AV₃Sb₅ (A = K, Rb, Cs) has been hotly contested, partly because the currents and magnetic fields involved are extremely small.
A team including researchers at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University used nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) — the most direct microscopic probes of internal magnetic fields — on CsV₃Sb₅. At the out-of-plane ¹²¹Sb site, which is sensitive to in-plane currents, they observed anomalous spectral broadening setting in around T* ≈ 120 K, coinciding with a nematic transition well above the conventional charge-density-wave transition. This is interpreted as microscopic evidence for a pure iCDW (loop-current) phase and spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking — a new form of magnetism generated not by spin but by orbital currents. Published in Nature Physics.
🌌 — A ghost particle traced to a dust-shrouded starburst galaxy 11 billion light-years away: ALMA imaging of the quadruply gravitationally-lensed galaxy nicknamed Shadow Blaster (JCMT0402−0424, z = 2.988), lying inside the IceCube localization of neutrino event IC 210922A, reveals a compact, gas-rich starburst core — the strongest evidence yet that distant dusty star-forming galaxies can be sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos (Y. Urata et al., Nature Astronomy) / “幽霊粒子”の起源を、110億光年かなたの塵に覆われたスターバースト銀河へたどる——IceCubeのニュートリノ事象IC 210922Aの位置領域内にある、四重に重力レンズされた銀河「シャドウ・ブラスター」（JCMT0402−0424、z = 2.988）をALMAで撮像し、コンパクトでガスに富む爆発的星形成コアを発見。遠方の塵に覆われた星形成銀河が高エネルギー宇宙ニュートリノ源となりうる、これまでで最も強い証拠（Y. Urata ら、Nature Astronomy掲載）
High-energy neutrinos are nearly massless, electrically neutral “ghost particles” that hardly interact with matter, so pinning down where they come from is extremely hard. In 2021 the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica recorded a high-energy event, IC 210922A, but its source remained unidentified — most secure neutrino counterparts so far have been linked to supermassive black holes (blazars), not ordinary galaxies.
A team led by Yuji Urata identified, inside the event's sky region, a dusty submillimetre galaxy nicknamed the Shadow Blaster (JCMT0402−0424). Follow-up imaging with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) showed it sits behind a gravitational lens that splits it into four magnified images, letting astronomers resolve a compact, gas-rich core of intense star formation at redshift z = 2.988 (about 11 billion years ago, at “cosmic noon”). With no bright γ-ray or X-ray counterpart and a low chance-coincidence probability, the galaxy is the most plausible candidate source — the strongest observational hint yet that dusty star-forming galaxies act as cosmic particle accelerators producing high-energy neutrinos. The study appears in Nature Astronomy.
Europe’s first and only transition-edge-sensor (TES) spectrometer at a synchrotron light source has gone into operation at BESSY II in Berlin. Developed by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) together with the MPI for Chemical Energy Conversion (Mülheim an der Ruhr) and NIST (Boulder, USA), the instrument detects the photons emitted by a sample with an efficiency 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers — opening photon-hungry techniques such as X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) to atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted samples. Measurements that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes.
The detector array holds 248 superconducting sensors cooled to 25 millikelvin by a He-3/He-4 dilution refrigerator similar to those used for quantum computers. An incoming photon briefly destroys the superconductivity of a sensor, and the resulting resistance jump is read out via an array of SQUIDs. Installed at the UE52-SGM beamline with full polarisation control and a sample chamber spanning 10 K to room temperature, the spectrometer complements band-structure methods such as ARPES; upgrades toward measurements in magnetic fields (XMCD, RIXS-MCD) are planned. Only five TES spectrometers existed at X-ray sources worldwide before — four in the U.S. and one in Japan. Published (open access) in Review of Scientific Instruments.
検出器アレイには248個の超伝導センサーが並び、量子コンピュータで使われるものと同種のHe-3/He-4希釈冷凍機で25ミリケルビンまで冷却される。光子が1個当たると、そのセンサーの超伝導が瞬間的に壊れて抵抗が跳ね上がり、これをSQUID（超伝導量子干渉素子）アレイの回路で読み出す仕組みだ。装置は偏光を完全制御できるUE52-SGMビームラインに設置され、10ケルビンから室温まで温度制御可能な試料チャンバーを備える。バンド構造を測るARPESなどを補完する手法であり、今後は磁場中測定（XMCD、RIXS-MCD）への拡張も計画されている。X線光源に設置されたTES分光器は世界でこれまで5台（米国4台・日本1台）のみで、BESSY IIの装置は欧州初となる。成果はReview of Scientific Instrumentsにオープンアクセスで掲載。
⏱️ — A thorium-229 nuclear clock runs in closed loop — ticking on a nuclear transition, not electrons, and already hunting dark matter (TU Wien / PTB / BEV Vienna) / トリウム229の“原子核時計”が閉ループ動作——電子ではなく原子核の遷移で時を刻み、すでにダークマター探索にも投入（ウィーン工科大学／PTB／BEV〔ウィーン〕）
An international team (TU Wien, lead author L. Toscani De Col; Germany's PTB; Austria's BEV; Leibniz University Hannover; and the Czech Academy of Sciences) reports a working thorium-229 optical nuclear clock with a feedback loop. Unlike conventional atomic clocks, which use electron-shell transitions, this clock stabilizes a continuous-wave laser to the ultra-narrow 148 nm transition inside the ²²⁹Th nucleus, with the thorium embedded in a millimetre-sized calcium-fluoride crystal at room temperature.
A subharmonic of the 148 nm light is continuously compared against a single-ion ytterbium (Yb⁺) clock; the nuclear clock shows shot-noise-limited stability scaling as 3×10⁻¹² (τ/s)⁻¹ᐟ², approaching 10⁻¹⁵ over a day. Because the nucleus couples strongly to the strong and weak forces, the clock is exquisitely sensitive to drifts in fundamental constants. The team already uses it to constrain ultralight dark matter by searching for periodic shifts and slow drifts in the nuclear transition energy — competitive with the best atomic clocks for photon coupling and going beyond previous limits for coupling to the strong force and quarks. Preprint arXiv:2606.04997.
国際チーム（ウィーン工科大学〔筆頭著者 L. Toscani De Col〕、ドイツのPTB、オーストリアのBEV、ハノーファー・ライプニッツ大学、チェコ科学アカデミー）が、フィードバックループを備えた動作するトリウム229光原子核時計を報告した。電子殻の遷移を使う従来の原子時計とは異なり、この時計は²²⁹Th原子核内部の極めて狭い148 nm遷移に連続波レーザーを安定化する。トリウムは室温のミリメートルサイズのフッ化カルシウム結晶に埋め込まれている。
✨ — A long-puzzling exotic meson finally shows its light: Belle/Belle II catch the Dₛ(2317) decaying by emitting a photon, opening a window on its internal structure (Phys. Rev. Lett.; highlighted in APS Physics) / 長年の謎だったエキゾチック中間子が“光を放って”崩壊——Belle/Belle IIがDₛ(2317)の光子放出崩壊を観測し、その内部構造に迫る手がかりに（Phys. Rev. Lett.／APS Physicsで紹介）
First seen in 2003, the Dₛ(2317) meson (one charm quark, one strange antiquark) has puzzled physicists because its measured mass (2.317 GeV/c²) sits far below quark-model predictions (above 2.4 GeV/c²). To explain this, theorists proposed competing pictures of its internal structure — a simple quark–antiquark state, a four-quark "tetraquark," or a loosely bound molecule — each predicting a different value for the ratio of its photon-emitting (radiative) decay to its pion-emitting decay.
Using data from Japan's KEKB and SuperKEKB electron–positron colliders, the Belle and Belle II Collaboration has now observed the particle's previously unseen gamma-emitting decay at a significance above 10 standard deviations, measuring the photon-to-pion ratio at about 7% — smaller than most quark–antiquark models predict but larger than most molecular models. Pinning down this number sharpens the case for the meson's true makeup and probes the strong force that binds matter. Accepted in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026; DOI: 10.1103/vcld-225s); preprint arXiv:2510.27174; highlighted in APS Physics. The measured ratio is [7.14 ± 0.70(stat.) ± 0.26(syst.)]%.
🕵️ — Hunting hidden particles in rare B-meson decays: using 711 fb⁻¹ of Belle data, the Belle/Belle II collaborations search five decay channels for an invisible "feebly interacting particle" — no signal, but the tightest limits to date, also constraining axion-like particles, dark scalars and "B-mesogenesis" (Belle & Belle II, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / Belle実験でB中間子のまれな崩壊から暗黒セクター候補粒子を探索——Belle/Belle II共同研究が711 fb⁻¹のデータで5つの崩壊チャンネルを解析し、目に見えない「弱結合粒子（FIP）」を探索。信号は見つからなかったが、これまでで最も強い制限を一部の候補に与え、アクシオン的粒子・ダークスカラー・「B-メソジェネシス」にも制約（Belle & Belle II、Physical Review Letters掲載）
Many extensions of the Standard Model predict feebly interacting particles (FIPs) — hypothetical particles that interact extremely rarely with ordinary matter, some of which could be dark-matter candidates or messengers to a hidden "dark sector." Because the decays of B mesons (heavy particles containing a bottom quark) are sensitive to such new states, Dr. Daniel Marcantonio (University of Melbourne) and the Belle & Belle II collaborations searched 711 fb⁻¹ of electron–positron collision data from the Belle experiment at KEK in Japan for an invisible particle Xinv produced together with a known hadron.
The analysis covered decays B⁰ → D̄⁰ Xinv and B± → h Xinv with h = π, K, Ds, p across five channels (three never searched before). No significant signal was observed, so the team set 90% confidence-level upper limits on the branching fractions, ranging from about 10⁻⁴ to 10⁻⁶ — the most stringent constraints to date for all of these channels, excluding previously unexplored parameter space for axion-like particles and dark scalars. The proton channel (B → p Xinv) also constrains "B-mesogenesis," a scenario in which early-universe B-meson decays could explain both dark matter and the matter–antimatter asymmetry.
Galaxy-formation models have a long-standing problem: the most massive galaxies contain fewer stars than predicted. A leading fix is feedback from the central supermassive black hole — powerful winds launched from its accretion disk that blow gas out of the galaxy and starve star formation. But how and when those winds switch on has been hard to pin down, because they are highly variable and earlier X-ray instruments could not cleanly resolve their fine structure.
Using the JAXA-led X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) (with NASA and ESA), whose energy resolution is roughly ten times that of its predecessor, University of Michigan doctoral student Xin “Cindy” Xiang and Professor Jon Miller studied the bright, nearby Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151 (a little over 50 million light-years away). Earlier work by the pair had shown the disk winds reach galaxy-clearing speeds and are launched by magnetocentrifugal driving (akin to what triggers solar flares). In the new analysis presented at the meeting, Xiang examined hundreds of days of observations, looking for X-ray flares and how the signal evolved in the following hours. She combined the X-ray brightness with its hardness/softness into a metric she called the color intensity index — shortened by Miller to “cindicity” — to flag when fast outflows are active. For NGC 4151 the fastest winds were strongest when the X-rays were hard but faint, and appeared not during a flare but typically about 10,000 seconds (just under three hours) afterward — the first direct timing link to the outflows, and a potential tool for spotting AGN “quenching” elsewhere. Presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena.
Keywords: XRISM, X線撮像分光ミッション, black hole wind, ブラックホールの風, AGN feedback, 活動銀河核フィードバック, ultra-fast outflow, 超高速アウトフロー, NGC 4151, Seyfert galaxy
💪 — The strongest force, measured most precisely: an ALPHA-collaboration lattice-QCD determination pins down the strong coupling constant αₛ with record precision — halving the combined uncertainty of all previous experimental measurements and sharpening tests of the Standard Model, Higgs physics and proton structure (Trinity College Dublin and partners, Nature) / 強い力の強さを表す「強結合定数 αₛ」を過去最高精度で決定——ALPHA共同研究の格子QCD計算が、これまでの全実験測定を合わせた誤差を半減。標準模型の検証、ヒッグス物理、陽子内部構造の精密理解を一段と前進させる（トリニティ・カレッジ・ダブリンほか、Nature掲載）
The strong coupling constant, αₛ, sets the strength of the interaction between quarks and gluons — the force that binds protons, neutrons and ultimately all nuclear matter. Of the Standard Model's fundamental parameters it has long been the least precisely known, and its uncertainty feeds directly into predictions for Higgs-boson production, the top-quark mass and hadronic decay widths. Prof. Stefan Sint of Trinity College Dublin, with collaborators in Germany, Spain and Italy (the ALPHA Collaboration), has now published the most precise determination of αₛ to date.
Using non-perturbative lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) — tracing the running coupling across energy scales with a gradient-flow/step-scaling strategy — the new result halves the error of all previous experimental measurements combined, setting a new benchmark for the Standard Model. Sharper knowledge of αₛ improves our understanding of how quarks and gluons behave inside protons, enables higher-precision measurements of the Higgs boson, and, by tightening theoretical predictions, increases the chance of spotting subtle signs of physics beyond the Standard Model at CERN's LHC.
Searching for ultralight (axion) dark matter means detecting extraordinarily weak oscillating fields, a task for which quantum sensing is especially promising. Most quantum sensors use two-level systems (qubits), but higher-dimensional systems offer largely unexplored potential.
Xiaolin Ma, Volodymyr Takhistov, Norikazu Mizuochi and Ernst David Herbschleb show that spin-1 nitrogen–vacancy (NV) centers in diamond can harness their multilevel (qutrit) quantum states to combine an enhanced signal response with common-mode noise suppression, achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity to the axion–electron coupling over qubit-based schemes. They further construct an optimal protocol that saturates the Cramér–Rao bound in a realistic open quantum system, yielding a universal fourfold enhancement in quantum Fisher information. Published as a Letter in Physical Review A.
Keywords: axion dark matter, アクシオン・ダークマター, nitrogen-vacancy center, NV中心, spin-1, スピン1, qutrit, quantum sensing, 量子センシング, multilevel
🌌 — A collapsing star might birth a "mini-universe" instead of a black hole: Goethe University theorists present the first dynamical general-relativity solution describing how a gravastar — a singularity- and horizon-free black-hole alternative — could actually form (Jampolski & Rezzolla, Phys. Rev. D) / 崩壊する大質量星はブラックホールではなく内部に「小さな宇宙」を作るかもしれない——ゲーテ大学（フランクフルト）の理論物理学者2氏が、特異点も事象の地平面も持たないブラックホールの代替天体「グラバスター（gravastar）」が実際にどう形成され得るかを示す初の動的な一般相対論解を発表（『Physical Review D』掲載・理論研究）
Daniel Jampolski and Prof. Luciano Rezzolla at Goethe University Frankfurt have presented what they describe as the first dynamical solution to Einstein's field equations of general relativity in which a collapsing star ends not as a black hole but as a gravastar (gravitational vacuum condensate star) — a hypothetical ultra-compact object, almost as dense as a black hole, but with no central singularity and no event horizon. Building on the textbook Oppenheimer–Snyder collapse model, their solution shows a tiny expanding de Sitter region — a "mini-universe" filled with dark-energy-like vacuum energy — nucleating at the center of the infalling matter and pushing back against gravity, halting the collapse and settling the system into a stable gravastar.
The result answers a roughly 25-year-old open question: gravastars had been proposed as singularity-free black-hole mimics, but no one could explain how one would actually form from ordinary matter. The authors are careful to note this is not skepticism toward black holes, which remain "the most natural and simplest" outcome of gravitational collapse; rather, it is an exploration of exotic alternatives. Because the behaviour of matter at such extreme densities is poorly understood, the scenario leaves room for new physics. This is a theoretical proposal, not an observation. Published in Physical Review D 113(12) (2026), DOI: 10.1103/c6lw-nx7k.
Keywords: gravastar, グラバスター, mini universe, 小さな宇宙, de Sitter region, ド・ジッター, black hole alternative, ブラックホールの代替, singularity, 特異点
🔭 — Dark energy survives a major challenge: a University of Southampton-led reanalysis (with Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt) finds the 2025 claim that cosmic acceleration is an "illusion" rested on flawed supernova age estimates — the accelerating expansion of the Universe remains robust (Wiseman et al., MNRAS) / 「宇宙の加速膨張は錯覚にすぎない」という説への大きな反証——サウサンプトン大学主導の再解析（2011年ノーベル物理学賞のアダム・リース氏、ブライアン・シュミット氏も共著）が、2025年の主張は超新星の“年齢推定”の誤りに基づくと指摘。加速膨張＝ダークエネルギーの存在は依然として揺るがないと結論（『王立天文学会月報 MNRAS』掲載）
In late 2025, a high-profile study argued that the evidence for dark energy was weakening — that the apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe might be an artifact of how Type Ia supernovae (the "standard candles" used to measure cosmic distances) are calibrated, claiming their peak brightness drifts as the Universe ages. A new investigation led by Dr. Phil Wiseman (University of Southampton), with co-authors including Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, reexamined the same data and found the 2025 analysis was flawed.
Specifically, the earlier work incorrectly equated the age of a host galaxy with the age of the white-dwarf progenitor star, and did not properly apply the standard host-galaxy-mass correction routinely used in modern cosmology. Once host environments and stellar populations are accounted for, the evidence for cosmic acceleration remains "remarkably consistent," and the standard ΛCDM picture — and the original Nobel-winning 1998 discovery — stands. The question of what dark energy is remains open; the question of whether it exists is, for now, settled in its favour. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2026).
Magnons (quantized spin waves) can carry information in magnetic materials without moving electric charge, making them attractive for ultra-low-power “magnonic” devices. In some magnets the magnon bands are topological, giving robust edge channels analogous to those of a topological insulator. But a long-standing worry was whether such topological magnons survive at practical temperatures: as a material warms, magnons become numerous and collide and interfere with one another in a complicated many-body way, and simple theories could not say how much this thermal noise would degrade the topological protection.
Then-graduate student Rintaro Eto and Professor Masahito Mochizuki of Waseda University, with collaborators at the University of Münster and the Technical University of Munich, built a new theoretical framework that accurately treats these mutual magnon–magnon collisions and interference. Applying it to the van der Waals honeycomb ferromagnets chromium tribromide (CrBr₃) and chromium triiodide (CrI₃), they showed quantitatively that the topological magnons in these materials are far more robust against heat than previously expected, remaining stable up to relatively high temperatures. The result offers a design guideline for hunting new quantum materials for future energy-efficient information technology. Published in the American Physical Society flagship journal Physical Review X (online 10 June 2026, local time).
🔬 — Motion of a levitated nanoparticle measured at the standard quantum limit: a Yale-led team detects tiny impulsive "kicks" on an optically trapped nanosphere — a mass some 6 orders of magnitude larger than in earlier quantum-limited experiments — and uses it to search for dark-matter scattering (Tseng et al., PRX Quantum, 2025) / 光で浮遊させたナノ粒子の運動を「標準量子限界」レベルの感度で測定——イェール大学主導のチームが、光トラップ中のナノ球（従来の量子限界実験より約100万倍重い物体）に働く微小な力積（“キック”）を検出し、暗黒物質（ダークマター）の散乱探索に応用。超高感度センサーへの道を開く成果（『PRX Quantum』2025年掲載）
A team led by David C. Moore at Yale University (Wright Laboratory) has pushed levitated optomechanics into a regime where the motion of an optically trapped silica nanosphere is measured so precisely that the dominant noise is quantum measurement backaction — the fundamental limit set by the very photons used to watch the particle (the standard quantum limit). The trapped object is a nanogram-scale mass, roughly six orders of magnitude heavier than the atoms or ions used in earlier quantum-limited measurements.
Operating there, the team detected impulsive momentum "kicks" on the nanosphere and exploited the sensor's directional sensitivity to search for recoils that could be produced by passing dark-matter particles scattering off the sphere's nucleons. The search set new limits on dark matter that couples to neutrons across a broad mass range and — for certain dark-matter models — can rival or exceed large underground detectors in just days of running. Beyond dark matter, the technique points toward ultra-sensitive force and inertial sensors and future searches for light dark matter and neutrino mass. Published in PRX Quantum 6, 040367 (2025), DOI: 10.1103/j76m-gcp1 (arXiv:2508.00815).
イェール大学のDavid C. Moore氏（Wright研究所）率いるチームが、浮遊オプトメカニクスを、光トラップ中のシリカ製ナノ球の運動を極めて精密に測定し、支配的なノイズが量子測定の反作用（バックアクション）——粒子を“見る”ために使う光子そのものが課す基本限界（標準量子限界）——となる領域にまで押し進めた。トラップした物体はナノグラム級の質量で、これまでの量子限界測定で使われてきた原子やイオンより約100万倍（6桁）重い。
Keywords: levitated nanoparticle, 浮遊ナノ粒子, levitated optomechanics, 浮遊オプトメカニクス, standard quantum limit, 標準量子限界, measurement backaction, 測定バックアクション, dark matter, 暗黒物質
🐦 — A way to write a Hamiltonian for systems that “break” Newton’s third law: bird flocks and other active systems have non-reciprocal interactions, and a constrained Hamiltonian with auxiliary “mirror” degrees of freedom reproduces their dynamics — reopening the full toolkit of classical statistical physics (Shi, Moessner, Alert & Bukov, Nature Physics) / 「ニュートンの第3法則を破る」系をハミルトニアンで記述——鳥の群れなどアクティブな系の「非相互的」な相互作用を、補助的な“阗”の自由度を加えた拘束付きハミルトニアンで再現し、古典統計物理の道具箱を使えるようにする（Shi・Moessner・Alert・Bukov、Nature Physics掲載）
Newton’s third law — every action has an equal and opposite reaction — underlies the way physicists define energy and run simulations. But in a vast class of active and driven systems, from sedimenting particles to bird flocks, interactions are non-reciprocal: a bird at the front of a flock influences those behind it far more than the reverse. Such one-sided couplings do not derive from a potential, so a conventional energy function — and the powerful tools built on it — cannot be defined.
Yu-Bo Shi, Roderich Moessner, Ricard Alert and Marin Bukov (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, with Nankai University) overcome this by constructing a Hamiltonian with auxiliary degrees of freedom — a fictitious “mirror partner” for each component — that, under a constraint, reproduces the original non-reciprocal dynamics. Monte Carlo simulations based on this constrained Hamiltonian recover both the steady and non-stationary states of the original (Langevin) dynamics, demonstrated for dissipative XY spins with vision-cone interactions. The symplectic structure even allows established Hamiltonian-engineering ideas — e.g. tuning a periodic (Floquet) drive to switch the effective lattice geometry. The work hands active-matter and non-equilibrium physics a long-missing analytical and numerical toolbox. Published in Nature Physics.
Keywords: non-reciprocal interactions, 非相互作用, Newton's third law, ニュートンの第3法則, active matter, アクティブマター, bird flocks, 鳥の群れ, Hamiltonian, ハミルトニアン
🧲 — Switchable chiral magnons observed in the altermagnet MnTe: polarized inelastic neutron scattering gives unambiguous evidence of magnon chirality, and a magnetic field reversibly flips it — a stray-field-free foundation for altermagnetic magnonics (Phys. Rev. Lett.) / オルター磁性体MnTeで「スイッチ可能なカイラルマグノン」を観測——偏光非弾性中性子散乱でマグノンのカイラリティを明確に示し、磁場で可逆的に反転させる——漏れ磁場のないオルター磁性マグノニクスの基盤（Physical Review Letters掲載）
Altermagnets are a recently recognized third class of magnet — their atomic spins cancel out (like an antiferromagnet, giving no net magnetization or stray field) yet their electronic bands are spin-split (like a ferromagnet). They are predicted to host chiral magnons: handed spin waves that carry spin angular momentum without the Joule heating that limits conventional electronics, making them attractive for energy-efficient “magnonic” devices.
A team reporting in Physical Review Letters directly observed chiral magnons in the altermagnetic prototype MnTe using polarized inelastic neutron scattering, providing the first unambiguous evidence of the chirality of the split magnon bands. Crucially, they showed the magnon chirality can be reversibly switched by an applied magnetic field. Because altermagnets carry no stray field and their chiral magnons can reach terahertz frequencies, the result establishes a robust, stray-field-free foundation for functional altermagnetic magnonics and ultrafast spintronics.
When a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart in a bright flare called a tidal disruption event (TDE). Such flares almost always occur at a galaxy’s center, where the black hole lives. But AT2024tvd, detected in 2024, is “off-nuclear” — it happened about 0.8 kiloparsecs away from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy (roughly 1011 solar masses).
In a follow-up study, a team analyzed the leftover glow from the disruption’s bright flashes and concluded that the culprit is a wandering supermassive black hole — one that is not located at the center of a visible galaxy, and that may have been stripped of its own galaxy in a past interaction. Off-nuclear TDEs like this offer a rare way to find and study the elusive population of roaming supermassive black holes. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Galaxies grow by turning gas into stars, and the direct fuel is cold molecular gas. In the very early Universe this fuel has been almost impossible to detect: the usual tracer is carbon monoxide (CO), but at high redshift the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is warmer and brighter, washing out the faint low-energy CO lines against an increasingly bright sky.
A team led by Karin Cescon (Leiden University), with advisor Jacqueline Hodge and collaborators, used deep NSF VLA (Very Large Array) Q-band and ALMA Band 3 observations to directly detect CO(3–2) and CO(7–6) emission in REBELS-25, a massive star-forming galaxy at redshift z = 7.31 — seen as it was only about 700 million years after the Big Bang, in the Epoch of Reionization. After correcting for the CMB, the CO(3–2) line — the highest-redshift detection of a low-J CO transition to date — implies a very large molecular gas mass of order 10¹¹ solar masses. The result confirms that big, gas-rich galaxies had already assembled enormous star-forming reservoirs within the first billion years of cosmic history, and it previews the kind of survey the future ngVLA will carry out. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
カリン・チェスコン（ライデン大学）を筆頭に、指導教員のジャクリーン・ホッジらのチームは、深いNSF VLA（超大型干渉電波望遠鏡群）のQバンドとALMAのバンド3の観測を用い、赤方偏移z=7.31の大質量星形成銀河REBELS-25で、CO(3−2)とCO(7−6)の輝線を直接検出した——これはビッグバンからわずか約7億年後、宇宙の再電離期の姿である。CMBの効果を補正して得られたCO(3−2)輝線は低準位CO遷移として史上最遠方の検出であり、太陽約1000億個分（10¹¹太陽質量）にのぼる非常に大きな分子ガス質量を示す。大きくガスに富んだ銀河が、宇宙史の最初の10億年のうちに既に膨大な星形成の貯蔵庫を築いていたことを裏づける成果で、将来のngVLAが行う観測の先駆けともなる。Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyに掲載。
Keywords: REBELS-25, cosmic dawn, 宇宙の夜明け, Epoch of Reionization, 再電離期, molecular gas, 分子ガス, carbon monoxide, 一酸化炭素, CO emission
🤖 — To find new physics, AI may need to "unlearn" the old: a Princeton/Flatiron study shows transfer learning can cut the cosmological simulations needed to search beyond the Standard Model by >10×, but warns of "negative transfer" — pretraining on ΛCDM can bias the AI and make it miss genuinely new physics (Krishnaraj et al., JCAP) / 新しい物理を見つけるには、AIは“古い常識”を忘れる必要があるかもしれない——プリンストン大学／フラットアイアン研究所の研究が、機械学習の「転移学習」を使えば標準模型を超える新物理探索に必要な宇宙シミュレーションを10分の1以下に削減できる一方、標準宇宙論（ΛCDM）で事前学習したAIが偏りを持ち“本当に新しい物理”を見逃す「負の転移（negative transfer）」のリスクを警告（『JCAP』掲載）
Testing cosmological models beyond ΛCDM — massive neutrinos, modified gravity, primordial non-Gaussianity — requires running huge numbers of computationally expensive simulations of virtual universes. Veena Krishnaraj, Adrian Bayer, Christian Kragh Jespersen and Peter Melchior (Princeton University / Flatiron Institute) tested whether transfer learning — pretraining a neural network on cheap, familiar ΛCDM simulations and then fine-tuning on harder beyond-ΛCDM scenarios — can reduce that cost. In favourable cases it cut the number of expensive simulations needed by more than a factor of ten.
But the team also documented a subtler failure mode they call "negative transfer": when a beyond-ΛCDM parameter is physically degenerate with a standard-model parameter, the network bakes in the ΛCDM associations as biases that actively hinder detecting the new physics — for example, misreading neutrino-mass signatures. The lesson generalizes to any foundation-model approach to "searching beyond a standard model," including particle physics at the LHC: pretraining accelerates inference but can blind you to the unexpected. As surveys like Euclid and the Rubin Observatory (LSST) arrive, the authors recommend auditing for degeneracies and using bottleneck / dummy-node architectures. Published in JCAP 06(2026)026, DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2026/06/026.
Keywords: transfer learning, 転移学習, machine learning, 機械学習, AI cosmology, AI宇宙論, cosmological simulation, 宇宙論シミュレーション, ΛCDM, beyond standard model
⚛️ — The LHC's final lap before the big upgrade: in 2026 the Large Hadron Collider is running its last data-taking season — proton and lead-ion collisions through the end of June — before a ~4-year shutdown (LS3) begins on 29 June to rebuild it as the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC), with physics restarting in 2030 (CERN) / LHC（大型ハドロン衝突型加速器）は2026年、大型アップグレード前の“最後の一周”——最終データ取得シーズンに突入。陽子衝突・鉛イオン衝突を6月末まで行ったのち、6月29日から約4年間の長期シャットダウン（LS3）に入り、高輝度LHC（HiLumi LHC）へと改造される。物理運転の再開は2030年の予定（CERN発表）
CERN's flagship accelerator has begun what its operators call the "final laps" of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) before a major overhaul. Stable beams for the 2026 physics run were declared on 7 March 2026, opening the last data-taking campaign of the current machine. The short but intense run packs in low-pile-up running for precision measurements (such as the W-boson mass), high-pile-up running to extend the dataset for rare processes, special low-energy and high-intensity beam tests, and about three weeks of lead-ion collisions recreating the quark–gluon plasma of the early Universe.
Collisions continue until the end of June; on 29 June 2026, Long Shutdown 3 (LS3) begins — roughly four years of work to replace part of the 27-km, 9000-superconducting-magnet machine with new equipment for the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC). HiLumi will eventually circulate over 2700 bunches per beam and boost integrated luminosity by about a factor of ten (toward 3000 fb⁻¹), sharpening studies of the Higgs boson and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. HiLumi physics running is planned to start in 2030.
The ultra-hot gas giant WASP-121 b is tidally locked: one hemisphere permanently faces its star and is heated to roughly 2,500 °C, while the night side is some 1,775 °C cooler. The boundary zones between day and night — the terminators, corresponding to eternal dawn and dusk — had long been predicted by atmospheric models to differ from each other, but clear observational proof was missing.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by Cyril Gapp (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) analysed infrared starlight filtering through the planet’s atmosphere during transits, exploiting the planet’s rotation during the transit (“rotational transits”) to separate the morning and evening limbs. The absorption pattern is distinctly asymmetric: fierce winds carry heat from the permanent dayside, making the evening terminator hotter and more inflated than the morning one. The data also show signs that water molecules are being thermally torn apart in the hottest regions, and hint at mineral clouds shaping the cooler morning side. The result is the clearest evidence yet that the two twilights of a tidally locked world have different temperatures and chemistry. Published in Nature Astronomy.
Friction slows moving objects at every scale, but at the electronic level a subtle form — quantum friction — describes the direct transfer of momentum between a liquid and the electrons of a solid. Because it is microscopic, it has been very hard to observe directly.
An interdisciplinary team at Ruhr University Bochum led by Sebastian Kruss, Marialore Sulpizi (theory and simulations) and Martina Havenith (THz spectroscopy) showed that near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water. Under green-light excitation, the diffusion constant of functionalized SWCNTs drops linearly by about 50% with excitation power — the opposite of the expected heating or light-driven motion. The effect vanishes when excitons are localized (SWCNTs with quantum defects), and chemically raising or lowering the exciton concentration tunes the diffusion by up to a factor of two. Optical-pump / terahertz-probe spectroscopy reveals an almost instantaneous response (around 30 cm−1), pointing to direct exciton–water coupling. Published open access in Nature.
Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). Excitons — bound electron–hole pairs — are a long-sought solid-state route to strongly interacting, electrically tunable, potentially multicomponent BECs, but firm evidence for equilibrium condensation had remained elusive.
Ruishi Qi, Qize Li and Feng Wang and colleagues report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of the constituent electrons and holes. The heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours; magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations and quantum phase transitions under magnetic field. At zero field the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours, and the condensate remains stable up to about 1.8 K. Published in Nature.
Running quantum algorithms for hard problems in physics and chemistry demands far lower error rates than today’s physical qubits provide, which requires quantum error correction (QEC) operating below a critical threshold.
A Microsoft–Quantinuum team (A. Paetznick, B. W. Reichardt, M. P. da Silva, K. M. Svore et al.) demonstrated on a trapped-ion QCCD processor improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× over physical-circuit baselines. The results use two codes optimized for the ion trap — a 12-qubit code encoding two logical qubits (inspired by Knill) and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four — combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection. In a Bell-state preparation the logical error rate fell from roughly 0.8% to 0.001% (the headline 800×); repeated error correction ran at a per-round rate 51× lower than baseline, and a 12-qubit cat state improved 22×. Published in Nature (654, 349–355).
MicrosoftとQuantinuumのチーム（A. Paetznick、B. W. Reichardt、M. P. da Silva、K. M. Svore ら）は、トラップイオン方式のQCCDプロセッサ上で、物理回路の基準に対して論理エラー率を11〜800倍改善したことを実証した。イオントラップ向けに最適化した2種類の符号——Knillに着想を得た2論理ビットの12量子ビット符号と、4論理ビットの16量子ビット「テッセラクト・カラー符号」——に、スケール可能な誤り検出とポストセレクションを組み合わせている。ベル状態の生成では論理エラー率が約0.8%から0.001%（＝800倍改善）に低下し、繰り返し誤り訂正では1ラウンドあたり基準比51倍、12量子ビットのキャット状態では22倍の改善を示した。Nature（654巻349〜355ページ）掲載。
Molecules are far harder to laser-cool and trap than atoms because of their many vibrational and rotational states. Metal hydrides are attractive because near-threshold dissociation of an ultracold molecule could yield even colder hydrogen atoms — but first the molecules must be trapped.
Jinyu Dai, Benjamin Riley, Qi Sun, Debayan Mitra and Tanya Zelevinsky (Columbia University and Indiana University Bloomington) demonstrated the first three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. Scattering roughly 104 photons (with vibrational loss covered up to ν = 2), they laser-slowed the beam to near-zero velocity with a “white-light” technique and loaded it into a radio-frequency MOT holding about 230 molecules below one millikelvin. The predissociation that limits the trap could, in turn, enable controlled breakup of CaH — a route to optically trapping hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy. Published in Physical Review Letters.
🥛 — China's JUNO neutrino observatory publishes its first physics results in Nature: with only 59.1 days of data, the 20-kton liquid-scintillator detector measures the solar oscillation parameters sin²θ₁₂ and Δm²₂₁ with 1.6× better precision than all previous experiments combined (JUNO Collaboration, Nature) / 中国の巨大ニュートリノ観測施設「JUNO（江門地下ニュートリノ観測所）」が初の主要物理成果を『Nature』に正式発表——わずか59.1日分のデータで、ニュートリノ振動の2つのパラメータ（sin²θ₁₂とΔm²₂₁）を、従来の全実験の組み合わせより1.6倍高い精度で測定。最大目標「ニュートリノ質量順序」の決定に向けた検出器性能も実証
The JUNO Collaboration has formally published its first physics results in Nature. JUNO (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory) is a 20-kiloton liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple nuclear reactor cores in Guangdong, China. Using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025 (2,379 inverse-beta-decay candidates), the collaboration reports the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters: sin²θ₁₂ = 0.3092 ± 0.0087 and Δm²₂₁ = (7.50 ± 0.12)×10⁻⁵ eV² (normal mass ordering), improving precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements — relative uncertainties of 2.81% and 1.55%.
The measurement also re-examines the mild "solar neutrino tension" — a ~1.5σ discrepancy between solar- and reactor-based determinations of these parameters — which JUNO is uniquely positioned to resolve using both neutrino sources. The rapid, world-leading result with such a short exposure validates the detector design and confirms JUNO's readiness for its primary goal: resolving the neutrino mass ordering (whether the third mass state is the heaviest or the lightest) with a larger dataset. Published in Nature 654, 343–348 (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10538-z (arXiv:2511.14593; first announced November 2025).
🏆 — 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience honors Eva Y. Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan H. MacDonald "for foundational work that established the field of Twistronics" — magic-angle graphene, moiré materials and twist-induced superconductivity (The Kavli Prize) / 2026年カブリ賞ナノサイエンス部門、「ツイストロニクス」分野を確立したEva Y. Andrei（ラトガース大）、Pablo Jarillo-Herrero（MIT）、Allan H. MacDonald（テキサス大オースティン校）の3氏が受賞——グラフェンを“魔法角”でねじり重ねるだけで超伝導などを引き出すモアレ物質研究の基礎を築いた業績
The biennial 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience has been awarded to Eva Y. Andrei (Rutgers University), Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT) and Allan H. MacDonald (University of Texas at Austin) "for foundational work that established the field of Twistronics" — the discovery that stacking two-dimensional materials such as graphene with a slight relative twist can fundamentally reshape their electronic properties. The three laureates share a USD 1 million honorarium awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters with the Kavli Foundation.
The prize recognizes a three-act story: in 2009, Andrei's group used scanning tunneling microscopy on accidentally twisted bilayer graphene to show that small twist-angle variations profoundly modify the electronic structure via moiré patterns; in 2011, MacDonald (with Rafi Bistritzer) predicted theoretically that at discrete "magic angles" (~1.1°) the electronic bands become flat, enormously enhancing interactions; and in 2018, Jarillo-Herrero's group experimentally realized magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, discovering correlated insulating phases and superconductivity — launching the explosive field of moiré quantum materials.
隔年で授与される2026年カブリ賞ナノサイエンス部門が、Eva Y. Andrei氏（ラトガース大学）、Pablo Jarillo-Herrero氏（MIT）、Allan H. MacDonald氏（テキサス大学オースティン校）に授与された。授賞理由は「ツイストロニクス分野を確立した基礎的業績」。グラフェンなどの2次元材料をわずかにねじって重ねるだけで電子物性が根本的に変わるという発見であり、3氏はノルウェー科学アカデミーとカブリ財団による賞金100万ドルを分け合う。
📉 — UK's flagship facilities Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source at risk as STFC seeks £162M in savings: facilities asked to model cuts of up to 20% (and scenarios of 20/40/60% for programmes), with decisions due in summer 2026 (reported by The Guardian; IOP) / 英国の大型研究施設「Diamond Light Source（放射光施設）」と「ISIS Neutron and Muon Source（中性子・ミュオン源）」が、STFC（科学技術施設会議）の1億6,200万ポンド規模の予算削減により最大20%規模の削減リスクに直面とガーディアン紙が報道——物理学・材料科学・生命科学の研究への影響が懸念
The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) must find cumulative savings of about £162 million by 2030 as its core budget stays roughly flat against sharply rising operating costs (notably electricity). According to reporting by The Guardian (10 June 2026), the national flagship facilities Diamond Light Source (the UK synchrotron) and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source face potential cuts of up to ~20%; the Institute of Physics notes that decisions on modelled cuts of 20%, 40% and 60% across STFC programmes are due in summer 2026.
The squeeze extends beyond facilities: UKRI has already told CERN it will withdraw from the LHCb detector upgrade, and particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics grants are under severe pressure. Because over 90% of UKRI-funded research at Diamond is supported by other councils (EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC), cuts would ripple far beyond "STFC science" into materials science, chemistry and the life sciences — prompting warnings from the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics.
英国の科学技術施設会議（STFC）は、コア予算が実質横ばいのまま電気代などの運営コストが急騰しているため、2030年までに累計約1億6,200万ポンドの削減を迫られている。ガーディアン紙（2026年6月10日）の報道によれば、英国を代表する大型研究施設である放射光施設Diamond Light Sourceと中性子・ミュオン源ISIS Neutron and Muon Sourceは最大20%程度の削減リスクに直面している。英国物理学会（IOP）によれば、STFCの各プログラムについて20%・40%・60%の削減シナリオが検討されており、2026年夏に決定が下される見込みだ。
🤖 — AI simulates giant stacks of atomic sheets and uncovers quantum effects invisible at small scale (University of Washington; PNAS & Nature Communications) / AIが原子シートの巨大な積層をシミュレートし、小さなモデルでは見えなかった大規模な量子効果を発見（ワシントン大学；PNAS＆Nature Communications）
Materials scientists at the University of Washington (Ting Cao and colleagues) used artificial intelligence to simulate huge stacks of two-dimensional atomic sheets — molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe₂) — assembled in intricate patterns. Trained on a relatively small dataset, the AI acts as a fast, inexpensive surrogate for a supercomputer, extrapolating the behaviour of very large material systems and revealing emergent quantum phenomena that simply do not appear in small clusters of atoms.
The approach (Yueyao Fan et al., published 2 June 2026 in PNAS; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2532550123) makes it practical to predict large-scale quantum behaviour — superconductivity, entanglement, exotic magnetism — that was previously impossible to model directly. A companion study (Lingnan Shen et al., Nature Communications, 8 June 2026; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72769-y) shows quantum computers naturally simulating hard quantum states (such as the Laughlin state), forming a self-improving loop: quantum computation generates data to refine the AI, and the AI guides the next quantum simulations. Together they point toward a hybrid AI-plus-quantum workflow for designing next-generation quantum materials and energy-efficient electronics.
Since 2022 the James Webb Space Telescope has found the early Universe littered with compact, crimson sources dubbed “little red dots” (LRDs) — so numerous that some feared they broke cosmological models. A team led by Vasily Kokorev (University of Texas at Austin) has now obtained the deepest spectrum of an LRD to date, for the object GLIMPSE-17775 at redshift 3.5 (about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang). The dot happens to lie behind the galaxy cluster Abell S1063, whose gravitational lensing boosted a roughly 20-hour Webb spectrum to the equivalent of about 80 hours of telescope time.
The spectrum shows more than 40 spectral lines, and multiple independent indicators all point the same way: hydrogen, oxygen and helium lines are broadened by electron scattering — the fingerprint of a dense, layered gas cocoon — while an “iron forest” of 16 iron lines and strong oxygen features demand a powerful central engine. The picture that fits is a “black hole star”: a rapidly accreting supermassive black hole (around five million solar masses, feeding at nearly twice the Eddington limit) wrapped in gas so thick it is opaque, reprocessing the radiation into the red glow Webb sees. A substantial host galaxy dilutes the usual Balmer break. The work, published in The Astrophysical Journal, is the strongest evidence yet for the black-hole-star interpretation of LRDs.
Keywords: little red dots, リトルレッドドット, LRD, black hole star, ブラックホール星, GLIMPSE-17775, JWST, ジェイムズ・ウェッブ宇宙望遠鏡, gravitational lensing, 重力レンズ
🌀 — Long-sought wind from the Milky Way's central black hole Sagittarius A* finally detected: deep ALMA observations reveal a ≥1-parsec conical cavity carved in the cold molecular gas (Gorski & Murchikova, Northwestern University, ApJL) / 天の川銀河中心の超大質量ブラックホール「いて座A*（Sagittarius A*）」から、半世紀にわたり探されてきた“風”の兆候をついに検出——ALMAの超深観測で、低温分子ガスに刻まれた長さ1パーセク以上・開き角約45度の円錐状の空洞を発見（ノースウェスタン大学 Gorski & Murchikova、The Astrophysical Journal Letters掲載）
Astrophysicists Mark D. Gorski and Lena Murchikova at Northwestern University report the discovery of a long-sought active wind from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Using more than 100 hours of ALMA observations accumulated over about five years — yielding an unprecedentedly deep (Tb ∼ 30 mK) and sharp (≲0.25″) map of the cold molecular gas — they detected a large conical clearing at least 1 parsec long with a ~45-degree opening angle next to the black hole.
The cavity, devoid of cold carbon-monoxide gas in the ALMA data, is filled with hot X-ray-emitting gas seen by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Its morphology and energetics are consistent with active clearing by a hot wind from Sgr A*, while alternatives such as stellar winds or a recent supernova are disfavored. Because Sgr A* is currently in a quiet, weakly accreting state, the result gives the first close look at the gentle feedback that typical, non-flaring supermassive black holes exert on their surroundings. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1004, L7 (4 June 2026), DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae63cf.
ノースウェスタン大学の天体物理学者Mark D. Gorski氏とLena Murchikova氏が、天の川銀河中心の超大質量ブラックホール「いて座A*（Sgr A*）」から吹き出す“風”の証拠を発見したと報告した。約5年間・100時間超に及ぶALMA（アタカマ大型ミリ波サブミリ波干渉計）の観測データを重ね合わせ、これまでにない深さ（輝度温度 約30 mK）と解像度（約0.25秒角以下）で低温分子ガスを地図化した結果、ブラックホールに隣接して長さ1パーセク以上・開き角約45度の円錐状の空洞を検出した。
Keywords: Sagittarius A*, いて座A*, supermassive black hole, 超大質量ブラックホール, black hole wind, ブラックホールの風, ALMA, Chandra, AGN feedback, 銀河中心
📡 — "Critical quantum sensing" — harnessing quantum phase transitions for ultra-precise measurement: a comprehensive PRX Quantum tutorial by UCD-led team maps strategies for sensors that exploit criticality, with prospects for gravitational-wave detection, medical imaging and navigation (Mihailescu et al., PRX Quantum) / 量子相転移の“臨界点”を使って微小信号を超高感度検出する「クリティカル量子センシング」の包括的チュートリアルがPRX Quantum誌に掲載——アイルランド・ユニバーシティ・カレッジ・ダブリン（UCD）主導の国際チームが理論枠組みと実装戦略を整理。重力波検出・医療イメージング・ナビゲーションなどへの応用に期待
Researchers led by University College Dublin (UCD) with international collaborators (G. Mihailescu, U. Alushi, R. Di Candia, S. Felicetti and K. Gietka) have published a comprehensive tutorial in PRX Quantum on critical quantum sensing — an emerging metrology paradigm that exploits the dramatically enhanced susceptibility and non-classical correlations that quantum systems spontaneously develop near quantum phase transitions. Near a critical point, a vanishingly small change in the quantity being measured produces a large, detectable response in the probe system.
The tutorial distills sophisticated theoretical frameworks (quantum Fisher information, optimal scaling of precision with probe size and protocol time, finite-component phase transitions, driven-dissipative criticality) into practical blueprints for next-generation sensors, guiding the reader through protocols of increasing complexity. Such criticality-enhanced sensors are being explored on platforms from superconducting resonators to trapped ions and cavity QED, with prospective applications in gravitational-wave detection, magnetometry, medical imaging and precision navigation. Published in PRX Quantum (2026); preprint arXiv:2510.02035.
アイルランドのユニバーシティ・カレッジ・ダブリン（UCD）主導の国際研究チーム（G. Mihailescu、U. Alushi、R. Di Candia、S. Felicetti、K. Gietkaの各氏）が、クリティカル量子センシング（臨界量子センシング）の包括的チュートリアル論文を『PRX Quantum』に発表した。これは、量子系が量子相転移の臨界点近傍で自発的に示す感受率の劇的な増大と非古典的相関を計測資源として利用する新しい量子計測パラダイムで、臨界点付近では測定対象のごくわずかな変化がプローブ系の大きな応答として現れる。
⚗️ — Ab initio calculations of β-decay half-lives for N=50 neutron-rich "waiting-point" nuclei match experiment — TU Darmstadt-led theory advance sharpens models of how gold, platinum and other heavy elements were forged in the cosmos (Zhen Li et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 重元素生成モデルの鍵を握るベータ崩壊計算が前進——TUダルムシュタット（ダルムシュタット工科大学）主導のチームが、中性子過剰核（N=50の“待機点”核）のベータ崩壊半減期を第一原理（ab initio）計算で予測し、既存の実験データと良好に一致。金や白金などの重元素が宇宙でどう作られたか（rプロセス）の理解に重要な一歩（Physical Review Letters掲載）
How are elements heavier than iron — such as gold and platinum — formed in the universe? Roughly half of them are produced by the rapid neutron-capture process (r-process), in environments like neutron-star mergers, where the synthesis flow repeatedly pauses at so-called waiting-point nuclei near closed neutron shells. The β-decay half-lives of these extremely neutron-rich nuclei set the tempo of the r-process and shape the final abundance pattern, but they are very hard to measure experimentally.
A team led by TU Darmstadt (Zhen Li et al.) has now computed β-decay half-lives of N=50 neutron-rich nuclei from first principles, using the ab initio valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group (VS-IMSRG) with chiral interactions and two-body weak currents. The predicted total half-lives agree well with existing experimental data, validating the framework and providing reliable predictions where measurements do not yet exist — a key input for simulations of heavy-element nucleosynthesis. Published in Physical Review Letters (2026), DOI: 10.1103/xjv9-t6sn.
Keywords: beta decay, ベータ崩壊, r-process, rプロセス, 重元素合成, heavy element nucleosynthesis, neutron-rich nuclei, 中性子過剰核, waiting point nuclei, 待機点核
💎 — Buried-growth process enables 2D arrays of position- and orientation-controlled diamond NV-center qubits: Kanazawa University and Diamond and Carbon Applications develop a single-chamber MPCVD etching-growth sequence for scalable room-temperature quantum devices (Carbon) / ダイヤモンド量子ビットの2次元配列作製に進展——金沢大学と独Diamond and Carbon Applicationsの研究チームが、ダイヤモンド中のNVセンター量子ビットを“位置”と“配向”の両方を制御しながら埋め込み成長させる新プロセス（マイクロ波プラズマCVDによる埋め込み成長法）を開発。室温量子技術・量子センサーへの応用に期待（Elsevier『Carbon』誌掲載）
Researchers at Kanazawa University, in collaboration with Diamond and Carbon Applications (Germany), have developed a buried-growth process for nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond using microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition (MPCVD). The key innovation is nitrogen-radical selective etching, which simultaneously hardens the metal mask through nitridation — enabling a continuous etching-then-growth sequence within a single MPCVD chamber and minimizing crystal damage.
Optical measurements confirmed highly aligned NV centers selectively buried in predefined regions — i.e., simultaneous control of both the position and the crystallographic orientation of the qubits, arranged in two-dimensional arrays. The method also works on standard (100) diamond substrates, indicating broad applicability. Because the NV center is the leading room-temperature solid-state qubit and quantum-sensor platform, a stable, scalable fabrication route to oriented NV arrays is an important step toward multi-qubit diamond devices and high-sensitivity magnetometry. Published in Carbon (Elsevier; online 29 January 2026); covered by Phys.org on 9 June 2026.
金沢大学（德田規夫教授ら）と独Diamond and Carbon Applications社の共同研究チームが、マイクロ波プラズマCVD（MPCVD）を用いてダイヤモンド中のNVセンター（窒素-空孔中心）を埋め込み成長させる新プロセスを開発した。鍵となるのは窒素ラジカル選択エッチングで、エッチングと同時に金属マスクを窒化により強化できるため、単一のMPCVD装置内でエッチングから成長までを連続して行うことができ、結晶ダメージを最小限に抑えられる。
Keywords: NV center, NVセンター, diamond qubit, ダイヤモンド量子ビット, nitrogen-vacancy center, 窒素空孔中心, MPCVD, マイクロ波プラズマCVD, buried growth, 埋め込み成長
🥞 — Unusual superconducting states and quantum anomalous Hall physics uncovered in rhombohedral graphene: electrons and holes localize on opposite surfaces of the chirally stacked layers (Lewandowski & Võ Tiến, Florida State University with international collaborators, Nature Physics) / 菱面体グラフェン（rhombohedral graphene）で珍しい超伝導状態と量子異常ホール効果の新側面を発見——階段状（カイラル積層）に重なった数層グラフェンでは、低エネルギーの電子が上下の表面に局在し、電子とホールが反対側の表面に分かれて存在する（フロリダ州立大学 Lewandowski・Võ Tiến ら国際共同研究、Nature Physics掲載）
Florida State University physicists Cyprian Lewandowski (Assistant Professor) and postdoctoral researcher Phong Võ Tiến, as part of an international collaboration, have uncovered new aspects of superconductivity and topology in rhombohedral graphene — a few layers of carbon atoms stacked like the treads of a staircase (chiral stacking). At low energy, electrons in this structure localize almost exclusively onto specific atoms on the top and bottom surfaces.
The system exhibits unusual superconducting states and a quantum anomalous Hall effect, with electron and hole carriers residing on opposite surfaces and minimal charge in the bulk. This dual-surface configuration enables emergent correlated and topological phases, making rhombohedral graphene a promising platform for exploring strongly correlated quantum matter. Because intrinsic superconductivity and quantum anomalous Hall states can coexist and be tuned in such flat-band systems, the material family is also discussed as a route toward topologically protected modes (such as Majorana zero modes) relevant to topological quantum computation. Published in Nature Physics (2026).
🐱 — Oxford physicists create a new family of Schrödinger-cat states: programmable superpositions built from highly non-classical components (squeezed, trisqueezed, quadsqueezed states) in the motion of a single trapped ion (Phys. Rev. X) / オックスフォード大学が新しい「シュレーディンガーの猫状態」のファミリーを作成——トラップした単一ストロンチウムイオンの運動状態を使い、スクイーズド・トライスクイーズド・クアッドスクイーズド状態といった非古典的な構成要素そのものを重ね合わせる、プログラム可能な量子重ね合わせ生成法を実証（Physical Review X掲載）
Researchers at the University of Oxford (including Dr Oana Băzăvan and Dr Sebastian Saner) have demonstrated a new family of Schrödinger-cat-like quantum states in the motion of a single trapped strontium-88 ion. Unlike conventional cat states built from displaced coherent wave packets, the new superpositions are assembled from components that are themselves highly non-classical — squeezed, trisqueezed and quadsqueezed motional states previously synthesised on the same platform.
The ion's internal electronic state acts as a qubit while its motion behaves as a quantum harmonic oscillator; engineered interactions entangle the two, and a mid-circuit measurement of the internal state projects the motion into the chosen superposition. The method is programmable — the size, orientation and separation of each component can be tuned — and reconstructed Wigner functions show interference fringes and Wigner negativity confirming genuine quantum superpositions. The work opens routes toward quantum computing with non-binary (oscillator-based) systems, quantum sensing, and probing the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds. Published in Physical Review X (2026).
🔭 — A 50-km table-top fiber interferometer for testing gravitational signatures in quantum interference: single-photon Mach-Zehnder reaches 4.42×10⁻⁶ rad sensitivity, en route to measuring gravity-induced phase shifts in the lab (Yu et al., now at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 量子力学と一般相対論をつなぐ卓上実験——光ファイバー50km分のマッハ・ツェンダー干渉計を卓上サイズにまとめ、単一光子レベルで位相感度4.42×10⁻⁶ radを達成。重力起因の位相信号に相当する変調信号の分解にも成功し、実験室で単一光子に対する重力の影響（重力赤方偏移）を測る道を開く（Haocun Yu〔現・テネシー大学ノックスビル校〕ら、Physical Review Letters掲載）
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two pillars of modern physics, yet experiments that combine the two frameworks remain rare. A team including Haocun Yu (now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has realized a 50-km table-top Mach-Zehnder fiber interferometer operating at the single-photon level — compressing what would otherwise be a kilometer-scale apparatus onto a laboratory bench using spooled optical fiber.
The interferometer achieved a phase sensitivity of 4.42×10⁻⁶ rad RMS in the 0.01–5 Hz band and resolved a modulated signal of (6.18 ± 0.44)×10⁻⁵ rad RMS at 0.1 Hz — a magnitude comparable to the gravitational phase shift expected in a table-top apparatus. Heralded single photons were generated by a Sagnac-geometry SPDC source and detected with superconducting nanowire detectors. The result surpasses all previous single-photon fiber interferometers in sensitivity and marks a concrete step toward measuring gravitational (general-relativistic) effects on single quanta of light in a controlled laboratory setting. Published in Physical Review Letters 136, 110803 (17 March 2026; arXiv:2511.17022); the work attracted renewed attention in June 2026.
Keywords: quantum gravity experiment, 量子重力実験, general relativity, 一般相対性理論, fiber interferometer, 光ファイバー干渉計, Mach-Zehnder, マッハ・ツェンダー干渉計, single photon, 単一光子
🧠 — Cryogenic "brain-like" hardware that works at 10 mK: gate-controlled negative differential resistance in standard silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs enables programmable spiking neuromorphic circuits for quantum-computer control (Zhang & Yang, University of Hong Kong, Nature Communications) / 絶対零度近くの10mKでも動作するSiC（シリコンカーバイド）系ニューロモルフィック回路——産業標準のSiC MOSFETでゲート制御可能な負性微分抵抗（NDR）を発見し、単一トランジスタで生体ニューロンの「スパイク」動作を再現。量子ビット近傍の制御回路の発熱・配線・冷却ボトルネック解消につながる可能性（香港大学 Yuhao Zhang教授・Xin Yang氏ら、Nature Communications掲載）
A team at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Centre for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits, led by Professor Yuhao Zhang and PhD student Xin Yang, has discovered gate-controlled negative differential resistance (NDR) in industry-standard silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs, arising from electron-donor impact ionization, with an on/off current ratio above 10⁷.
For the first time, a single transistor was shown to mimic the energy-efficient "spiking" behavior of biological neurons at temperatures as low as 10 millikelvin. The team demonstrated programmable cryogenic spiking neuromorphic circuits — sensory, logic, and integrate-and-fire neurons — that can be cascaded into larger networks. Because qubit-control electronics must dissipate almost no heat at millikelvin temperatures, this technology could relieve the wiring and cooling bottlenecks of scaling quantum computers (e.g., local processing for quantum error correction and real-time control), and SiC's established 300-mm foundry manufacturability eases adoption; the rugged circuits also suit deep-space exploration. Published in Nature Communications (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70963-6.
🌌 — The mysterious "Amaterasu particle" may not be a proton: ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays could be ultraheavy nuclei beyond iron, which survive intergalactic travel while retaining extreme energies — pointing to sources like magnetars and compact-object mergers (Kohta Murase et al., Penn State / Kyoto University, Phys. Rev. Lett.) / 超高エネルギー宇宙線「アマテラス粒子」の正体に新説——陽子ではなく“鉄より重い”超重原子核の可能性。ペンシルベニア州立大学・京都大学（基礎物理学研究所）などの国際チームの計算により、超重核は銀河間空間でエネルギーを失いにくく極限エネルギーのまま地球に到達できることが判明。マグネター（強磁場中性子星）やコンパクト天体合体など宇宙線源の特定にも影響（Physical Review Letters掲載）
The Amaterasu particle — an ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray of ~244 EeV (over 240 exa-electronvolts) detected by the Telescope Array in Utah in 2021, second in energy only to the 1991 "Oh-My-God particle" — has puzzled physicists because its arrival direction traces back to the Local Void, a nearly empty region of space with no obvious powerful source. New research led by Kohta Murase (Penn State), with collaborators at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (Kyoto University), Virginia Tech and other institutions, proposes a resolution: the particle may be an ultraheavy atomic nucleus, heavier than iron, rather than a proton.
Detailed simulations of how particles of different masses propagate through intergalactic radiation fields show that, at Amaterasu-like energies, ultraheavy nuclei lose energy more slowly than protons or intermediate-mass nuclei, letting them survive cosmic distances while retaining extreme energies — and changing the inferred magnetic deflection, hence the reconstructed source direction. If some of the highest-energy events are ultraheavy nuclei, candidate accelerators shift toward environments rich in heavy elements, such as magnetars (strongly magnetized neutron stars) and compact-object mergers. The authors stress they are not claiming all UHECRs are ultraheavy — but the possibility reshapes the source search. Published in Physical Review Letters (2026).
🌠 — Earliest known "flickering" quasar discovered just 850 million years after the Big Bang: 14 years of reprocessed NEOWISE data reveal that J0439+1634 (z=6.51) already hosts a thin, mature, pancake-flat accretion disk — deepening the puzzle of how supermassive black holes grew so fast (Eilers, Leung, De et al., MIT / Columbia, Nature Astronomy) / 宇宙誕生からわずか約8億5000万年後の、史上最古の“ちらつく（flickering）”クエーサーを発見——MIT・コロンビア大学などのチームがNASAのNEOWISE衛星の14年分のアーカイブデータを再処理し、クエーサーJ0439+1634（赤方偏移6.51）の明滅を検出。降着円盤がすでに現在のクエーサーと同様の“薄いパンケーキ型”だったことが判明し、初期宇宙で超大質量ブラックホールがなぜ急速に成熟できたのかという謎がさらに深まる（Nature Astronomy掲載）
Astronomers at MIT, Columbia University and other institutions have detected the earliest known flickering quasar, tracing its light back to the "cosmic dawn" — just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The object, J0439+1634 at redshift z = 6.51, shines with the brightness of roughly 12 trillion suns. Using archival infrared data from NASA's NEOWISE mission (2010–2024), reprocessed in a project launched by Kishalay De (now at Columbia), the team tracked the quasar varying randomly by about 20% over 14 years — "much like a candle's flame flickers without a fixed pattern."
Because the flicker pattern at different wavelengths encodes the structure of the accretion flow, the team could infer the disk geometry: surprisingly, this very young quasar already has a thin, flat, pancake-like accretion disk, resembling those of mature, modern-day quasars rather than the chaotic, puffed-up disks expected during rapid early growth. The result suggests that the messy, super-fast growth phases of supermassive black holes happened very early — before we see them as luminous quasars — deepening the mystery of how billion-solar-mass black holes matured so quickly. Published in Nature Astronomy (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02897-4; led by Anna-Christina Eilers and Gene Leung (MIT Kavli Institute).
Keywords: quasar, クエーサー, J0439+1634, flickering quasar, ちらつくクエーサー, supermassive black hole, 超大質量ブラックホール, accretion disk, 降着円盤, cosmic dawn
💎 — "Crystals" of space-time could seed naked singularities and microscopic black holes, higher-dimensional general-relativity analysis hints (theoretical study incl. Christian Ecker, Goethe University Frankfurt, Phys. Rev. Lett.; reported by Live Science) / 時空の“結晶”が裸の特異点や微小ブラックホールの起源になる可能性——一般相対論を高次元に拡張した解析的研究により、時空幾何の繰り返し（結晶状）パターンから裸の特異点・微小ブラックホールが生じうることを数学的に示す理論的前進。ホーキングやソーンが論じた宇宙検閲仮説をめぐる長年の問題に新たな知見（ゲーテ大学フランクフルトのChristian Ecker氏ら、Physical Review Letters掲載・Live Science報道）。※現実の宇宙に存在することを示したものではない
By extending general relativity into higher dimensions, a trio of theoretical physicists — including Christian Ecker of Goethe University Frankfurt — has mathematically shown that a repeating, crystal-like pattern of ripples in space-time geometry could give rise to naked singularities (singularities not hidden behind an event horizon) and microscopic black holes.
The study, published in Physical Review Letters and reported by Live Science, revisits a problem contemplated by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne about whether naked singularities can emerge from rare patterns in space-time geometry. Earlier numerical simulations were limited by finite computer precision; the new analytical treatment provides the deeper understanding that exact equation-based methods offer. Importantly, this is a theoretical advance — it does not show that such space-time crystals exist in the real universe — but it sharpens the long-standing debate around the cosmic censorship conjecture.
Keywords: naked singularity, 裸の特異点, cosmic censorship conjecture, 宇宙検閲仮説, general relativity, 一般相対性理論, higher dimensions, 高次元時空, black hole, ブラックホール
🔥 — Metamaterials boost near-field radiative heat transfer up to fourfold: gold split-ring resonators patterned on silicon nitride membranes enhance heat flow across nanoscale gaps (Shen group, Carnegie Mellon University with Stanford & Purdue, Nature) / ナノスケールで熱移動を最大4倍に強化——窒化ケイ素（SiN）メンブレン上にパターニングした金のスプリットリング共振器メタマテリアルにより、数百ナノメートルのすき間を介した近接場放射熱伝達を大幅に増強。チップ冷却や熱光起電力（熱→電気変換）への応用に期待（カーネギーメロン大学Sheng Shen教授ら、スタンフォード大・パデュー大共同、Nature掲載）
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, with collaborators at Stanford University and Purdue University, have experimentally demonstrated metamaterial-mediated enhancement of near-field radiative heat transfer. When two objects are only a few hundred nanometers apart, thermal energy can tunnel across the gap via evanescent electromagnetic waves, exceeding the far-field blackbody limit — and engineered structures can push this much further.
The team, led by mechanical engineering professor Sheng Shen, patterned microscopic gold split-ring resonators onto silicon nitride (SiN) membranes and positioned them face-to-face across a nanoscale gap, increasing heat transfer by as much as four times compared with unstructured gold plates or bare membranes. The result is one of the clearest experimental confirmations that radiative heat flow can be actively designed, with prospects for chip cooling, thermophotovoltaics (converting heat into electricity), thermal energy harvesting, and infrared sensing. Published in Nature (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10595-4.
🔗 — A surprisingly simple recipe for highly entangled quantum states: slightly detuning atomic energy levels inside an optical cavity unlocks a broad variety of entangled many-body states, including AKLT states (Clerk group, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Phys. Rev. X) / 複雑な量子もつれ状態を作るシンプルな方法——光共振器（キャビティQED）内の原子のエネルギー準位をレーザーや磁場でわずかに調整し、原子ペアごとに正負反対のエネルギーオフセットを与えるだけで、AKLT状態を含む多様な高もつれ多体状態を生成できる理論手法を提案。量子センサーや将来の量子技術に応用可能（シカゴ大学プリツカー分子工学スクール Aashish Clerk教授ら、Physical Review X掲載）
A team at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, led by Professor Aashish Clerk, has proposed a surprisingly simple way to create powerful entangled quantum states in cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED). In standard cavity QED, all atoms couple to the confined light identically; this symmetry limits which entangled states the system can produce.
The new method breaks that symmetry without new hardware: while all atoms are driven by a common laser, an additional magnetic field or lasers tune the excited-state energies of different groups of atoms, with each atom paired to another carrying an equal-and-opposite energy offset. This generates a wide variety of highly entangled states — including noise-resistant configurations for measuring gradients of magnetic or gravitational fields, and complex many-body states such as AKLT states of interest for quantum computing and condensed matter physics. The theoretical proposal, supported by the DOE's Q-NEXT center, is published in Physical Review X (2026).
🔗 — ATLAS finds strong evidence (4.7σ) of quantum entanglement between two massive Z bosons produced in Higgs-boson decays: first entanglement measurement between spin "qutrits" at the electroweak scale, via H→ZZ*→4ℓ at 13/13.6 TeV (ATLAS Collaboration, CERN) / CERNのATLAS実験、ヒッグス粒子の崩壊で生じる2つのZボソン間の量子もつれに4.7σの強い証拠——H→ZZ*→4レプトン過程の角度分布解析により、巨大な質量を持つベクトルボソン同士（スピン1の“クートリット”）の量子もつれを電弱スケールで初めて測定（LHC Run 2+Run 3データ、13/13.6 TeV）
The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider has reported the first measurements of quantum entanglement between spins in pairs of Z bosons, using the rare but pristine decay H → ZZ* → 4 leptons (electron or muon pairs) in proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV and 13.6 TeV (Run 2 + Run 3). Measurements of angular observables sensitive to the ZZ* spin-density matrix yield coefficients C₂,₁,₂,₋₁ = −0.71 ± 0.45 and C₂,₂,₂,₋₂ = 0.08 ± 0.44, consistent with Standard Model predictions.
A complementary likelihood-ratio test using the full angular distribution — relying on several Standard Model assumptions in the decays — rejected the non-entangled (separable-state) hypothesis with an observed significance of 4.7 standard deviations (4.9σ expected). This constitutes strong evidence of quantum entanglement between massive vector bosons — spin-1 "qutrits" (three-level quantum systems) — at the electroweak energy scale, extending tests of quantum mechanics to by far the highest energies ever probed and opening a new program of quantum-information measurements at colliders. Reported in an ATLAS physics briefing (June 2026); paper submitted as arXiv:2603.26463.
🧲 — A familiar magnet gets stranger: spin-ARPES reveals that elemental cobalt hosts a rich network of room-temperature-stable topological electronic states, recasting it as a tunable spintronics platform (Sánchez-Barriga et al., HZB / BESSY II, Communications Materials) / ありふれた磁石が“奇妙”に——スピン分解ARPESにより、元素としてのコバルト内部に室温でも安定なトポロジカル電子状態が多数存在することが判明し、調整可能なスピントロニクス基盤として捉え直される（HZB／BESSY II・Sánchez-Barrigaら、Communications Materials掲載）
Cobalt is one of the best-studied magnetic metals — a textbook elemental ferromagnet found in hard drives, motors and battery materials — so few surprises were expected from its electronic structure. An international team led by Jaime Sánchez-Barriga at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) used spin-resolved photoemission (spin-ARPES) at the BESSY II synchrotron and found otherwise: cobalt is threaded with spin-polarized magnetic nodal lines — extended paths where two spin-sorted electron bands cross without opening a gap — that remain robust even at room temperature.
Because cobalt's magnetism breaks time-reversal symmetry, the electrons forming these nodal lines carry a net spin polarization that can be fully reversed by flipping the magnetization, and near the crossings they behave like fast, nearly massless Weyl-like carriers. Switching the magnetization direction can open a gap at selected crossings or continuously tune the spin texture — precisely the kind of magnetic on/off control wanted for spintronic devices, which encode information in electron spin rather than charge. Cobalt's elemental simplicity and high Curie temperature keep these states stable at and above room temperature, reframing a familiar metal as a tunable topological platform. The work is a measurement of material properties, not yet a working device.
Actively feeding black holes betray themselves as brilliant quasars, but a dormant black hole emits almost nothing — its presence can only be inferred from the motion of stars caught in its gravity. That “stellar dynamics” technique had so far been limited to relatively nearby galaxies. An international team led by Andrew B. Newman (Carnegie Science), with co-authors including Meng Gu, Sirio Belli and Richard S. Ellis (UCL), has now pushed it to a record distance.
The target is MRG-M0138, a massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 1.95 — seen as it was when the Universe was only about 3 billion years old, roughly 10 billion light-years away. A foreground galaxy cluster acts as a natural gravitational lens, magnifying the galaxy about 30-fold. Combining this magnification with JWST NIRSpec integral-field spectroscopy, the team spatially resolved the stellar kinematics inside the black hole’s sphere of influence and weighed it at 6.0 (+2.1/−1.7) × 109 solar masses — the most distant dormant black hole ever measured, about 15 times farther than the previous record. Both the black hole and its galaxy are inert: MRG-M0138 likely once hosted a luminous quasar whose feedback shut down star formation. Intriguingly, the measured mass is consistent with one local black-hole–galaxy scaling relation but inconsistent with another, providing a rare test of how these correlations evolved. Published in Science.
活発に物質を飲み込むブラックホールは明るいクエーサーとして自らの存在を示すが、休眠中のブラックホールはほとんど何も放射しない——その存在は、重力に捕らえられた恒星の運動からしか推定できない。この「恒星力学」による質量測定は、これまで比較的近傍の銀河に限られていた。Andrew B. Newman（カーネギー研究所）率いる国際チーム（共著者にMeng Gu、Sirio Belli、Richard S. Ellis〈UCL〉ら）は今回、この手法を記録的な距離へと押し広げた。
Keywords: dormant black hole, 休眠ブラックホール, supermassive black hole, 超大質量ブラックホール, MRG-M0138, stellar dynamics, 恒星力学, gravitational lensing, 重力レンズ, JWST
🧩 — LHCb completes the family of doubly charmed baryons: at the Beauty 2026 conference, the LHCb collaboration at CERN reports the first observation of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon (two charm quarks and one strange quark) at a mass of about 3727 MeV/c² — the third and final member of a multiplet predicted around 50 years ago, found in 2024 Run-3 proton–proton collision data (LHCb / CERN) / LHCbが二重チャームバリオンの一族を完成——CERNのLHCb実験が国際会議Beauty 2026で、チャームクォーク2個とストレンジクォーク1個からなる二重チャーム Ωcc⁺ バリオン（質量およそ3727 MeV/c²）の初観測を報告。約50年前に予言された多重項の3番目にして最後のメンバーを、2024年のRun-3陽子–陽子衝突データで捉えた（LHCb／CERN）
Quarks — up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom — bind into baryons (three quarks, like the proton and neutron) and mesons. Particles carrying two charm quarks are especially rare and heavy, and the quark model has long predicted a trio of such “doubly charmed” baryons. LHCb discovered the first (Ξcc⁺⁺) in 2017 and the second (Ξcc⁺) earlier in 2026, leaving one member missing.
At the Beauty 2026 conference in Maastricht, the LHCb collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the first observation of the Ωcc⁺ baryon — containing two charm quarks and one strange quark — completing the family. Reconstructed from 2024 Run-3 proton–proton collision data, it appears as a peak around a mass of 3727 MeV/c² (roughly four times the proton mass) in the Ωc⁰π⁺ spectrum, with the short-lived particle travelling a fraction of a millimetre before decaying. The result, about 50 years after such states were first predicted, sharpens tests of how the strong force binds heavy quarks.
🐱 — A new family of Schrödinger-cat states built from intrinsically nonclassical components: using the motion of a single trapped ion, Oxford physicists assemble superpositions not from ordinary coherent wave packets but from already highly nonclassical squeezed, trisqueezed and quadsqueezed states, demonstrating programmable, Wigner-negative quantum states relevant to bosonic quantum error correction (S. Saner et al., Physical Review X) / 本質的に非古典的な部品から作る、新種の「シュレディンガーの猫」状態——オックスフォードの物理学者が、単一イオンの運動を用い、ふつうのコヒーレント波束ではなく、もともと強く非古典的なスクイーズド／トリスクイーズド／クアッドスクイーズド状態を部品にして重ね合わせを生成。プログラム可能でウィグナー負性をもつ量子状態を実証し、ボソニック量子誤り訂正に役立つ可能性（S. Saner ら、Physical Review X掲載）
A Schrödinger-cat state places a system in a quantum superposition of two distinct configurations at once. Traditionally these “cats” are built from coherent states — the most classical-like wave packets — placed in opposition. Such states are central to quantum sensing and to bosonic error-correction codes for quantum computers.
Researchers at the University of Oxford, including Sebastian Saner and Raghavendra Srinivas, instead built cat-like superpositions from components that are themselves already deeply nonclassical: squeezed, trisqueezed and quadsqueezed motional states of a single trapped ion, in which quantum uncertainty is reshaped in unusual ways. By engineering interactions between the ion's internal qubit and its motion, they sculpted programmable superpositions and confirmed genuine quantum features such as interference and Wigner negativity. The approach deepens the quantum character of cat states from the inside and supplies a platform that squeezed-cat error-correction schemes require. The work appears in Physical Review X.
U.S. startup Atom Computing announced what it describes as the industry’s first full demonstration of quantum error correction using a toric code — the torus-shaped stabilizer code proposed by Alexei Kitaev that underlies much of modern fault-tolerance theory — on a neutral-atom quantum computer. According to the company, the results show that logical error rates decrease as more qubits are used, the key scaling requirement for fault tolerance, and that error correction was sustained over many consecutive rounds — a feat previously reported by only one other company, and now achieved with neutral atoms for the first time.
Atom Computing credits several architectural features: the ability to dynamically rearrange atoms, giving effective all-to-all connectivity unconstrained by a fixed chip layout; a zoned architecture that parallelizes operations; and nuclear-spin qubits with very long coherence times, needed to survive deep circuits. “This is the clearest demonstration yet that neutral atoms are highly competitive with superconducting systems and other approaches for building scalable logical qubits,” said CEO and founder Ben Bloom. The claims are from the company’s June 3 press release; a detailed technical publication is the natural next step for independent scrutiny.
✂️ — What happens if you try to cut a single photon in half? A theoretical study finds that snipping the extended wave of a photon with an ultrafast optical shutter would not produce two smaller photons but an infinite swarm of them — a vivid illustration of how quantum field theory forbids half a photon (Johannes Skaar et al., Physical Review Letters) / 1個の光子を半分に切ろうとしたら？——超高速の光シャッターで光子の広がった波を切り取ろうとすると、2個の小さな光子ではなく“無限の光子の群れ”が生じる、とする理論研究。場の量子論が「半分の光子」を許さないことを鮮やかに示す（Johannes Skaar ら、Physical Review Letters掲載）
By definition, a photon is an elementary particle of light that cannot be split into smaller pieces. Yet a photon is also an extended wave spread across space. So what would happen if you intercepted only part of that wave — for example, with an ultrafast optical shutter (a very fast mirror switched on and off) that blocks the middle of a light pulse?
In a theoretical study in Physical Review Letters, Johannes Skaar and colleagues show the answer is strange: you cannot make “half a photon.” Instead, the act of abruptly chopping the wave injects energy and conjures an infinite swarm of additional photons out of the vacuum. The result is a clean, intuitive demonstration of how quantum field theory protects the photon as an indivisible quantum, and of how sharp time-domain manipulations of light create particles. A preprint is available on arXiv (2510.21636).
Magnons — the quanta of spin waves in a magnet — are promising carriers for sensing and quantum information, but like any physical system they are subject to thermal fluctuations (noise) that blur precise measurements. A technique called squeezing redistributes those fluctuations in phase space, pushing the noise in one quadrature below its usual level at the expense of the conjugate one; squeezing is well established for light and for mechanical oscillators, but realizing and characterizing it in magnetic media had remained largely unexplored.
A team led by Tomosato Hioki and Kaito Tojo (equal contribution) with Professor Eiji Saitoh at the University of Tokyo — together with the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR) at Tohoku University (Mehrdad Elyasi, Gerrit E. W. Bauer), RIKEN CEMS and JST — demonstrated single-mode thermal squeezing of the magnetization dynamics in an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film using microwave parametric excitation, driving the noise below the thermal level in one phase. They further observed two-mode thermal squeezing: correlated fluctuations between two magnon modes concentrated on the top and bottom surfaces of the film, persisting even near room temperature. The result opens paths to ultra-low-noise magnetic sensing, future quantum information technology, and heat engines that use non-equilibrium squeezing to beat equilibrium thermodynamic limits. Published (open access) in Nature Physics (1 June 2026).
東京大学の日置友智助教と東條海斗氏（共同筆頭）、齊藤英治教授（兼・理研CEMSチームディレクター、東北大WPI-AIMR主任研究者）を中心に、東北大材料科学高等研究所（WPI-AIMR）のMehrdad Elyasi准教授・Gerrit E. W. Bauer主任研究者、理研、JSTが参加した研究グループは、イットリウム鉄ガーネット（YIG）薄膜の磁化ダイナミクスにおいて、マイクロ波パラメトリック励起を用いた単一モードの熱スクイージングを実証し、ノイズを特定の位相で熱励起レベル以下に抑制した。さらに、薄膜の上面と下面に偏って存在する2つのマグノンモード間に相関が生じる二モードの熱スクイージングも観測し、室温付近でも持続することを示した。磁気デバイスの究極的な低ノイズ化、将来の量子情報技術、そして非平衡特有のスクイーズ強度を使って平衡熱力学の限界を超える熱機関の創出に道を開く。Nature Physicsにオープンアクセスで掲載（2026年6月1日）。
🏛️ — Public debate on CERN's next-generation Future Circular Collider (FCC) — the proposed ~91 km "Higgs factory" — opens in France under the CNDP (2 June – 1 October 2026), alongside the Swiss consultation: scientific promise weighed against environmental impact and power consumption ahead of a 2028 decision (CERN / CNDP) / CERN次世代加速器「FCC（将来円形衝突型加速器）」建設をめぐる公開討論がフランスで開始——ヒッグス粒子を精密研究する全周約91km（フィージビリティ報告では90.7km）の“ヒッグス工場”構想について、フランス国家公開討論委員会（CNDP）主催の公開討論が2026年6月2日〜10月1日に実施（キックオフ集会は6月4日）。スイス側の市民協議（5月18日〜10月2日）と並行し、科学的意義とともに環境負荷・電力消費も議論。建設可否の決定は早くて2028年
The formal public debate on CERN's Future Circular Collider (FCC) project has opened in France, organized under the auspices of the Commission Nationale du Débat Public (CNDP) and running from 2 June to 1 October 2026, with a kick-off meeting on 4 June at Archamps. It runs in parallel with the Swiss public consultation (18 May – 2 October 2026). Public debates under the CNDP are the most important form of public participation in France for major infrastructure projects.
If approved — with the CERN Council decision expected no earlier than 2028 as part of the update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics — the FCC would be built in a ring-shaped tunnel of about 91 km circumference (90.7 km in the feasibility study) at an average depth of ~200 m beneath the Haute-Savoie and Ain departments in France and the canton of Geneva. Its first phase (FCC-ee) would collide electrons and positrons as a "Higgs factory", measuring the Higgs boson and other Standard Model particles with unprecedented precision to probe dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry and physics beyond the Standard Model. The debates address not only the scientific case but also environmental impact, land use and electricity consumption of the giant machine.
In certain atomically thin semiconductors, electrons can occupy one of two energy “valleys” — a quantum label, the valley degree of freedom, that could encode information much like spin does in spintronics. The field of valleytronics has long been stuck on a practical problem: researchers could generate valley-encoded signals or detect them, but never do everything in one integrated device.
A team at Monash University led by Dr. Chi Li (with co-first author Dr. Kaijian Xing and senior author Dr. Haoran Ren, alongside Professors Michael S. Fuhrer and Stefan A. Maier) has now built a fully integrated on-chip programmable valley optoelectronic nanocircuit that creates, routes and reads valley-encoded light signals within a single compact system — at room temperature. The key was a straightforward stacking approach that combines few-atom-thick materials with engineered metasurfaces, sidestepping the difficulty of growing such materials directly on photonic structures. As a demonstration, the chip encoded and processed two separate images simultaneously. The international collaboration spanned Australia, China, Singapore, Germany and Japan (including Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi), and the authors see applications in low-energy photonic computing, quantum technologies and optical communications. Published in Nature Photonics.
For over a decade the proton radius puzzle nagged at physics: measurements of the proton’s charge radius using ordinary (electronic) hydrogen gave one answer, while experiments replacing the electron with a heavier muon pointed to a proton about 4% smaller. Either the experiments harboured systematic problems, or the rules physicists use to describe nature needed revision — a new force or particle coupling differently to electrons and muons.
A team at Colorado State University led by Dylan Yost, with PhD student Ryan Bullis as first author, settled the question with a table-top laser-spectroscopy measurement. They produced a beam of atomic hydrogen in a vacuum chamber and used lasers to drive electrons between energy levels; because the proton’s size subtly shifts those levels, the radius can be inferred from how the electrons respond. The atoms move fast and interact with the laser only briefly, which washes out the signal, so Bullis developed a new technique using two laser fields simultaneously — a first for this purpose — to sharpen the precision. The result: a radius of about 0.84 femtometres, against the previously accepted 0.876 fm, in agreement with theory at the parts-per-trillion level. It is simultaneously a stringent test of quantum electrodynamics, and it eliminates a new force or particle as the explanation in this case. A Max Planck Institute team reached a consistent value at nearly the same time by a different method. Published in Physical Review Letters; the group now turns to deuterium.
Early fault-tolerant quantum computers — machines capable of on the order of a million reliable logical operations (the “megaquop” regime) — are expected within a few years, but two overheads threaten to eat their budget: preparing low-noise “magic” resource states via distillation, and synthesizing arbitrary rotations from a discrete gate set. QuEra Computing and Los Alamos National Laboratory have published a hardware/software co-designed answer: the transversal STAR (Space-Time Efficient Analog Rotation) architecture, tailored to reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays.
For structured tasks such as simulating quantum materials and non-equilibrium many-body dynamics, the scheme performs the needed small-angle rotations directly and transversally, bypassing magic-state distillation and discrete gate synthesis, and yielding execution speed-ups of up to ~250× over conventional fault-tolerant approaches. Integrating high-rate qLDPC codes (such as a [[32, 2, 4]] toric variant) whose internal symmetries align with the simulated lattice pushes the required physical footprint down to roughly 1,500–3,000 qubits — versus about 10,000–15,000 for the surface-code version — while keeping the speed advantage. The paper is led by co-first authors Refaat Ismail (QuEra) and I-Chi Chen (Los Alamos National Laboratory), with co-authors including Fangli Liu, Hengyun Zhou, Sheng-Tao Wang and Milan Kornjača (QuEra) and Andrew Sornborger (LANL). Published in PRX Quantum; preprint on arXiv.
100万回規模の信頼できる論理演算（「メガクオップ」領域）をこなす初期の誤り耐性量子コンピュータは数年内の登場が見込まれるが、その計算予算を食い潰しかねない2つのオーバーヘッドがある。蒸留による低ノイズな「魔法状態」の準備と、離散的なゲート集合から任意回転を合成するゲート合成だ。QuEra Computingとロスアラモス国立研究所（LANL）は、再構成可能な中性原子アレイに合わせてハードとソフトを共同設計した解答——transversal STAR（Space-Time Efficient Analog Rotation）アーキテクチャ——を発表した。
Keywords: QuEra, Los Alamos National Laboratory, ロスアラモス国立研究所, transversal STAR, fault-tolerant quantum computing, 誤り耐性量子計算, magic state distillation, 魔法状態蒸留, qLDPC codes, qLDPC符号
⚡ — Controlling the nonlinear Hall effect for battery-free electronics: a QUT/NTU-led team shows how impurities and lattice vibrations govern the nonlinear Hall effect in the topological insulator Bi₂Te₃, which turns ambient AC signals straight into DC power — without diodes — pointing toward self-powered, battery-free sensors (Qi, Wang et al., Newton) / 「非線形ホール効果」を制御してバッテリー不要の電子デバイスへ——豪QUT（クイーンズランド工科大学）とシンガポールNTU（南洋理工大学）主導のチームが、トポロジカル絶縁体Bi₂Te₃（テルル化ビスマス）における非線形ホール効果を支配する“不純物”と“格子振動”の役割を解明。環境中の交流（AC）信号をダイオードなしで直接直流（DC）に変換できるこの量子効果は、自己給電型・電池レスセンサーの基礎になり得る（Cell Press『Newton』誌掲載）
The nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE) is a quantum transport phenomenon in which a voltage appears perpendicular to an applied alternating current even with no magnetic field — and, crucially, it can rectify, converting an AC drive directly into DC output without the diodes and junctions a conventional rectifier needs. That makes it attractive for harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy (Wi-Fi and other radio-frequency fields arrive as oscillations) to power devices without batteries.
An international team led by Prof. Dongchen Qi (Queensland University of Technology) and Prof. Xiao Renshaw Wang (Nanyang Technological University) studied the NLHE in the well-known topological insulator bismuth telluride (Bi₂Te₃) and disentangled which microscopic mechanisms control it: impurity scattering dominates at low temperature, while lattice vibrations (phonon scattering) take over as the material warms, with the rectified output able to strengthen and even reverse direction near ~230 K. This temperature tunability is a step toward designing compact, room-temperature AC-to-DC energy harvesters and self-powered sensors. Published in Newton (Cell Press, 2026), DOI: 10.1016/j.newton.2026.100410. (Primary coverage of this study appeared in February 2026, with continued attention into mid-2026.)