Global Energy Awards

 IBM and University Researchers Create a Never-Before-Seen Molecule and Prove its Exotic Nature with Quantum Computing An international team of scientists from IBM (NYSE: IBM), The University of Manchester, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, EPFL and the University of Regensburg have created and characterized a molecule unlike any previously known — one whose electrons travel through its structure in a corkscrew-like pattern that fundamentally alters its chemical behavior. Published today in Science, it is the first experimental observation of a half-Möbius electronic topology in a single molecule. To the scientists’ knowledge, a molecule with such topology has never before been synthesized, observed, or even formally predicted. Understanding this molecule’s behavior at the electronic structure level required something equally fundamental: a high fidelity quantum computing simulation. The discovery advances science on two fronts. For chemistry, it demonstrates that electronic topology ...

 Molecular 'catapult' fires electrons at the limits of physics Electrons can be "kicked across" solar materials at almost the fastest speed nature allows, scientists have discovered, challenging long-held theories about how solar energy systems work. The finding could help researchers design more efficient ways of harvesting sunlight and converting it into electricity. The research is published in Nature Communications. In experiments capturing events lasting just 18 femtoseconds—less than 20 quadrillionths of a second—researchers at the University of Cambridge observed charge separation happening within a single molecular vibration. "We deliberately designed a system that—according to conventional theory—should not have transferred charge this fast," said Dr. Pratyush Ghosh, Research Fellow, at St John's College, Cambridge, and first author of the study. "By conventional design rules, this system should have been slow, and that's what makes the...

 Superfluids emerge in 2D moire crystal formed from time, study predicts An AI-enhanced conceptual illustration depicting ultracold atoms being 'twisted' by multiple laser pulses, offering a visual representation of our core idea: using periodic driving to engineer moiré patterns in time. Credit: Liang, Zhang & Zhang. (PRL, 2026). Conventional crystals are materials in which atoms arrange themselves in repeating spatial patterns. Time crystals, on the other hand, are phases of matter characterized by repeating motions over time without constantly heating up, breaking a physical rule known as time-translation symmetry. Researchers at East China Normal University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University recently predicted the formation of a new type of time crystal, dubbed a two-dimensional (2D) moiré time crystal. This crystal was theorized to emerge when periodic perturbations (i.e., regular, repeated disturbances) are applied to ultracold atoms held in a smooth, continuous trap, ...

Setting the scene for a quantum marketplace: where quantum business is up to and how it might unfold As quantum computing makes its first forays from the lab to the real world, are the latest claims mere hype causing a bubble that will burst before the field finds its feet? Or are investors and researchers right to be enthusiastic about this burgeoning technological revolution? Philip Ball investigates the successes and pitfalls of commercializing quantum information technology When the world’s “first quantum computer” hit the market in 2015, the response was decidedly mixed. Perhaps it’s not surprising that demand for the machine was not exactly clamorous, given its price tag of $10m. But some accused the makers, the quantum-computing company D-Wave Systems from Burnaby in Canada, of hyping the abilities of its machine – which was not even unanimously agreed to be making use of quantum principles at all. It wasn’t an auspicious start to the commercialization of quantum information...

 Congo basin blackwater lakes are releasing ancient carbon into the atmosphere Deep in the Congo Basin, vast peatlands quietly store enormous amounts of Earth’s carbon — but new research suggests this ancient vault may be leaking. Scientists studying Africa’s largest blackwater lakes discovered that significant amounts of carbon dioxide bubbling into the atmosphere come not just from recent plant life, but from peat that has been locked away for thousands of years. At the confluence of the Fimi and Kasai rivers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, dark water from forest landscapes meets water from the savannahs, colored red by iron oxides. Credit: Matti Barthel / ETH Zurich Tropical swamps and peatlands are critical players in Earth's carbon cycle and, by extension, the global climate. In regions such as the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin, and the wetlands of Southeast Asia, thick layers of partially decomposed plant material build up over time. Together, these ecosystems lock away ...

This ultra-thin surface controls light in two completely different ways A new metasurface design lets light of different spins bend, focus, and behave independently—while staying sharp across many colors. The trick combines two geometric phase effects so each spin channel can be tuned without interfering with the other. Researchers demonstrated stable beam steering and dual-focus lenses over wide frequency ranges. The approach could scale from microwaves all the way to visible light. The achromatic lens can focus the incident RCP and LCP light onto two distinct positions without chromatic aberration over a wide bandwidth. Credit: School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University Broadband achromatic wavefront control is a key requirement for next-generation optical technologies, including full-color imaging and multi-spectral sensing. Researchers led by Professor Yijun Feng and Professor Ke Chen at Nanjing University have now reported a major advance in this area in Phot...