The process of building and running an optics experiment to analyze a material’s properties could one day be fully automated, MIT scientists say. Taking a step toward such a future, they developed a reconfigurable, robotic optics laboratory.

The process by which quantum phenomena like 'superposition'—the paradoxical affliction of Schrödinger’s cat—fade into the classical reality we experience is known as 'decoherence.' Now, a new FQxI-funded experiment has narrowed the field of possible explanations for decoherence, in particular ruling out a prominent theory linking gravity to the process. The results appeared in a paper in the New Journal of Physics in June 2026.

Researchers at Ningbo University have developed a brain-inspired acoustic-optical information reservoir system that combines a self-powered triboelectric acoustic sensor with an indium-zinc-oxide photoelectronic neuromorphic transistor. The integrated system can sense sound and light, reproduce synaptic-like memory behaviors, and convert voice commands and drone trajectory images into high-dimensional conductance states. Combined with a multilayer perceptron classifier, the system achieved average testing accuracies of approximately 89.8% for nine voice commands and 93.6% for nine drone trajectories. The work provides a potential hardware platform for intelligent voice interaction, multimodal edge sensing and autonomous applications in the low-altitude economy.

Laser processing is widely used to “repair” and pattern graphene oxide for flexible electronics. Surprisingly, researchers found that laser treatment can shorten rather than improve the material’s fatigue lifetime. By combining Raman spectroscopy, nano-infrared imaging and atomic force microscopy, the team discovered that laser irradiation selectively removes epoxide groups while leaving behind vacancy defects, revealing the chemical origin of fatigue degradation.

Oxide semiconductors are promising building blocks for complementary transparent electronics, and however p-type oxide semiconductors suffer from limited material choice and low carrier mobility as compared to their n-type counterparts. Herein, a wafer-scale growth of amorphous tellurium oxide (TeO_x) thin films with p-type transport characteristics was demonstrated, through a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method coupled with a low-temperature post-annealing treatment. Ultrathin TeO_x with the thickness down to several nanometers is prepared by oxidizing the Te thin films precisely deposited and controlled by PLD technique, where their stoichiometric ratio can be modulated by the annealing time. Moreover, the optical bandgap of TeO_x is found to be varied from 0.59 eV to 0.98 eV during the oxidation process. As a result, the TeO_x-based field-effect transistors exhibit a competitive hole transport behavior as compared to reported amorphous TeO_x, along with the current on/off ratio exceeding 2 × 10³ (1.3 × 10⁷) and hole mobility of 47.6 ± 2 cm²·V^-1·s^-1 (41.8 ± 0.5 cm²·V^-1·s^-1) at 300 K (80 K). These findings promise a facile and controllable approach to synthesize wafer-scale and ultrathin p-type oxides for future complementary electronics.