In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed the first magnetic multipole-based micromagnetic model for antiferromagnets. Published in Applied Physics Reviews, their generalized framework provides a theoretical and computational foundation for designing future spintronic devices made with antiferromagnetic materials.

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Superconductors have long been considered a promising technology for the energy systems of the future. They can conduct electricity without resistance, thus eliminating both conduction losses and waste heat. Up to now, however, superconductors have only been applied in special cases, as in the immensely powerful magnet coils of particle accelerators such as the Large […]

From mobile phones and banking systems to aircraft, ships and emergency services, much of modern life relies on precise timing signals from satellites. Known as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), satellites carrying atomic clocks transmit time-stamped signals to receivers on Earth. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the best-known GNSS in Australia and the […]

Researchers have created a special flat lens that shapes light into an optical needle—a thin beam that stays tightly focused over a long distance. Combining this lens, which is about 7 microns thick, with optical coherence tomography (OCT) could allow imaging that reaches deeper into tissue while maintaining a sharp focus.

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Physicists have long puzzled over a strange contradiction inside a family of minerals called rutile oxides. These materials all share the same crystal structure—but while some of them, like titanium dioxide, are firmly insulating, others, like ruthenium dioxide, conduct electricity like a metal. So far, physicists have had little idea of why this happens.

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The rise of AI has created an almost insatiable appetite for computing power. Training and running AI systems requires vast numbers of transistors, and engineers are now racing to pack more of them onto every chip. With their existing designs, however, silicon transistors are rapidly running up against physical limits on how small they can […]

Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen has developed a highly complex laser-optical system for a quantum computer currently under construction at the 5th Institute of Physics at the University of Stuttgart. This system enables 2,000 Rydberg atoms to be positioned with submicrometer precision in the computer’s highly compact vacuum chamber. To do this, the system projects an […]