Just the word “quantum” can make even seasoned science teachers break into a sweat. But a national pilot program led by The University of Texas at Arlington is helping take the mystery out of the subject for students and educators alike. This week, 50 high school students and science teachers gathered at Arlington Martin High School to dive into the topic through Quantum for All, a program launched by Karen Jo Matsler, a professor of practice and master teacher in UT Arlington’s UTeach program. 

A team of international scientists headed by Prof. Marco Salvalaglio from TUD – Dresden University of Technology has found out that internal stresses—not just interface energy—play a key role in shaping the microstructure of crystalline materials. These findings challenge classical theories and could improve how we design materials for engineering and technology. The results have recently been published in the scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)”.

It can be found inside gas giants such as Jupiter and is briefly created during meteorite impacts or in laser fusion experiments: warm dense matter. This exotic state of matter combines features of solid, liquid and gaseous phases. Until now, simulating warm dense matter accurately has been considered a major challenge. An international team led by researchers from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) in Germany and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has succeeded in describing this state of matter much more accurately than before using a new computational method. The approach could advance laser fusion and help in the synthesis of new high-tech materials. The team presents its results in the journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-60278-3).

Advanced quantum technology needs integrated cryogenic control. Professor David Reilly and colleagues at the University of Sydney present in Nature a control platform that will allow the scale up of quantum tech to build useful machines. The platform can also be applied for use in data centres and other advanced electronics.

Quantum computers can solve extraordinarily complex problems, unlocking new possibilities in fields such as drug development, encryption, AI, and logistics. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a highly efficient amplifier that activates only when reading information from qubits. Thanks to its smart design, it consumes just one-tenth of the power consumed by the best amplifiers available today. This reduces qubit decoherence and lays the foundation for more powerful quantum computers with significantly more qubits and enhanced performance.

This work marks the first practical use of boson sampling, long seen as a key demonstration of quantum computing’s potential to outperform classical methods.

The researchers used computer simulations to model a quantum optical experiment that recognizes images using just three photons, successfully identifying images from several well-known datasets.

This paves the way towards future applications of quantum AI in complex image recognition, and represents a step toward low-resource, energy-efficient quantum computing.