New research shows quarks create wakes as they speed through quark-gluon plasma, the material that existed during the first microseconds of the early universe. The findings could help physicists understand the earliest moments of the infant universe.

Researchers at the University of Basel and the ETH in Zurich have succeeded in changing the polarity of a special ferromagnet using a laser beam. In the future, this method could be used to create adaptable electronic circuits with light.

Writing in Nature, a team led by physicists Cory Dean from Columbia University and Jia Li from the University of Texas at Austin has observed a superfluid, which normally remains in constant motion, come to a standstill. “For the first time, we’ve seen a superfluid undergo a phase transition to become what appears to be a supersolid,” said Dean. It’s like water freezing to ice, but at the quantum level.

Small enough to fit in a smartphone, the optical amplifier developed at Stanford could not only improve fiber optic networks that are the backbone of the internet, but also spur new technologies such as biosensing for environmental toxin detection and medical diagnostics.

A development at Stanford turns qubits, quantum bits of information, stored in atoms into light, and for the first time, collects that information using one photon for each atom simultaneously. This “parallel interface” makes it possible to get information out of the quantum computer quickly and could be scaled up to create networked quantum supercomputers.