Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises a more effective protection against cyber threats. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles. Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the ‘quantum repeater’. They report their results in Nature Communications.

Acoustic frequency filters, which convert electrical signals into miniaturized sound waves, separate the different frequency bands for mobile communications, Wi-Fi, and GPS in smartphones. Physicists at RPTU have now shown that such miniaturized sound waves can couple strongly with spin waves in yttrium iron garnet. This results in novel hybrid spin-sound waves in the gigahertz frequency range. The use of such nanoscale hybrid spin-sound waves provides a pathway for agile frequency filters for the upcoming 6G mobile communications generation. The fundamental study by the RPTU researchers has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers from the Inorganic Chemistry Departments of the Fritz Haber Institute revealed how structural changes on the surface and in the bulk region of the cobalt oxide catalyst Co₃O₄ influence its selectivity in the production of industrially relevant chemicals like acetone. They discovered that a metastable, structurally “trapped” state exhibits the highest catalytic activity - an important finding for catalyst design.

The IPCC has developed the Global Warming Potential metric, a unit that compares a specific gas’s contribution to climate change to that of carbon dioxide. Nitrogen trifluoride is particularly bad, with a GWP about 17,000 times higher than carbon dioxide. But NF3 is critical in the semiconductor industry for etching and cleaning, and its use has increased more than twentyfold over the past 30 years. In the JVST:B, researchers develop a machine learning framework to predict the GWP of potential alternative materials.

When aggressive cancer cells spread through the body, they cause metastasis, which significantly reduces a person’s chance of survival. For this spreading to take place, they can switch between different cell states that move with different strategies. In Biomicrofluidics, by AIP Publishing, a team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience explored the mechanics at play that enable two types of metastatic cancer cells to achieve the same result of movement, with only one doing so via tissue manipulation. The research is among the first to reveal a direct link between cancer cell deformability and active migration through small gaps.

Physicists from Swansea University have played the leading role in a scientific breakthrough at CERN, developing an innovative technique that increases the antihydrogen trapping rate by a factor of ten.

Bowhead whales likely reproduce beneath the sea ice northwest of Spitsbergen, while using the open water in the eastern Fram Strait as a migration corridor. This conclusion comes from researchers in the Ocean Acoustics Group at the Alfred Wegener Institute, who recorded the calls of bowhead whales using underwater recorders and analysed the records with artificial intelligence. Their study on bowhead whale habitat use in relation to sea-ice cover has now been published in the journal Scientific Reports.