Crossing into a mirror world: Particles turn to wisps of fog, and the magnetic monopole paradox dissolves

August 7, 2026 In Goethe’s ballad “Erlkönig,” immortalized in Schubert’s fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: “Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif”—my son, it is only a wisp of fog. In the poem, the father’s reassurance proves tragically wrong.

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Physicists watch a material’s electrons assemble, and reassemble, into coexisting phases

August 7, 2026 A tall glass of ice water isn’t just a thirst quencher; it’s also an everyday example of coexisting phases. Water can exist simultaneously in both liquid and solid phases. As it turns out, this phase duality can also exist in more exotic quantum materials, in ways that are far more complicated to

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New ‘shape-shifting’ architecture brings versatility to photonic quantum computing

August 7, 2026 Using light to process quantum information is one of the most promising approaches to building future quantum computers. Light particles, known as photons, are excellent carriers of quantum information, but their lack of natural interactions has created a major challenge for researchers seeking to build systems capable of performing a full range

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Two-qubit entangling gate flags its own errors as detectable photon losses

August 6, 2026 Quantum errors are a normal part of quantum computing because fragile physical qubits (the tiny components storing data) can easily break down because of environmental noise, like heat, stray signals or microscopic vibrations. Typical fixes involve vast amounts of extra hardware qubits, which make computers larger, more expensive and harder to build.

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Sunlight-powered setup generates quantum entanglement

August 6, 2026 Today’s quantum technologies rely on energy-intensive lasers, raising concerns that scaling them up could further increase energy demands. In new work, researchers have demonstrated that quantum entanglement between photons can be generated directly from sunlight, offering a potential alternative. Read the full article →

New quantum microscopy trick quadruples microscope resolution

August 6, 2026 Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now achieved a fourfold resolution boost compared to a classical microscope, using a new

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X(2370) emerges as glueball-dominated particle in collider experiments

August 6, 2026 At the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil, the BESIII Collaboration report that, after 15 years of sustained research, it identified the dominant constituent of the X(2370) as a pseudoscalar glueball with spin-parity quantum numbers of 0⁻⁺. Read the full article →

Rare-earth ions could enable telecom-ready control of interacting qubits

July 29, 2026 Quantum technologies are devices and systems that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics and could perform tasks that are difficult or impossible to tackle using their classical counterparts. These technologies process and store information using qubits (i.e., quantum bits), which can exist in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously. Read the full

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Physicists create Bose–Einstein condensate from ultracold polar molecules

July 30, 2026 Bose–Einstein condensates are states of matter that form when particles called bosons are cooled to temperatures that are only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (i.e., 0 Kelvin [-460°F]). In these states, particles occupy the same quantum state and exhibit interesting collective behaviors, essentially behaving as if they were a

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Quantum in the palm of your hand: The evolution of superconducting qubits

July 30, 2026 Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people’s injuries. Read the full article →