Rice’s Naomi Halas, Peter Nordlander and Hossein Robajatzi have been awarded the 2026 Hill Prize in Engineering for their work advancing light-driven technologies for sustainable ammonia synthesis.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone in this eighteenth edition to physicists Allan MacDonald (The University of Texas at Austin) and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) for their discoveries concerning the “magic angle” that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled. What the committee terms the “pioneering” insights of the two researchers have provided both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a whole new field, now known as twistronics, where superconductivity, magnetism and other target properties can be obtained by rotating new materials such as graphene.

Researchers from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Technical University of Braunschweig, and the University of Delaware achieved new insight into the inner structure of the ¹⁷³Yb⁺, and in particular its nucleus. This could advance research in areas such as atomic clocks, tests of fundamental physics, and quantum information processing. The results are published in the latest issue of the renown scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

For the first time, a research group at the University of Potsdam has succeeded in tracking and quantifying the light-induced accumulation of charge on gold nanorods in real time. A new physical model of this process, describing nanoparticles as capacitors, is relevant to the development of sustainable procedures such as CO₂ reduction, water splitting, and solar energy conversion. The publication “Capacitive photocharging of gold nanorods” was published in Nature Communications and was recognized as “Editor’s Highlight”.

Scientists at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL have realised a long-pursued experimental goal in physics: to show how electrons dance together. The technique, known as X-ray four-wave mixing, opens a new way to see how energy and information flow within atoms and molecules. In the future, it could illuminate how quantum information is stored and lost, eventually aiding the design of more error-tolerant quantum devices. The findings are reported in Nature.