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UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a public body that funds science and business, under the control of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It has announced a budget of £38.6 billion over the next four years, which it claims is actually a slight rise, though this doesn’t factor in inflation. But it has also warned that physics research is due for significant cuts.

UKRI spending is intended to further scientific research but also generate a return for the country. The organisation’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, said in a press briefing on 5 February that the organisation was now focusing more on commercialisation. “We’re a public body, in service of the UK public. The public should expect us to make those hard choices to make sure we make the biggest impact to the country, to grow our economy,” he said.

The organisation distributes grants through nine councils, one of which – the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – focuses on particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. This includes the budget for the UK’s contributions to CERN and the European Space Agency. It is STFC that faces the bulk of the cuts, at a reported £162 million.

Recipients of STFC funding have been told by the body to expect cuts of 30 per cent overall, but were asked to draft different budgets with cuts of 20 per cent, 40 per cent and 60 per cent, according to the Institute of Physics (IOP), which called the news a “devastating blow for the foundations of UK physics”.

IOP president-elect Paul Howarth said in a statement that the cuts would harm “human understanding of the universe and human progress”. “The Large Hadron Collider alone has informed our fundamental understanding of the universe and the matter it is made of. Accelerators developed for particle physics are used in X-ray facilities and new cancer treatments,” he said. “This cut in UK funding will hold up advances in its experimental capability, which will mean less innovation and ultimately less economic growth. We urge the government to step back and consider how its new funding strategy will impact UK science.”

Michele Dougherty, executive chair of STFC, said in a briefing that the organisation had been too ambitious about what it wanted to achieve in previous years. “We’re spread much too thinly, we’re trying to do too many things,” she said. “We’ve got a difficult couple of years in front of us. We simply don’t have the money to do everything.”

Dougherty admitted in the briefing that international collaborations on particle physics were coming to an end and that hard choices were being made. “I think it’s a message that our international partners understand. They too are under financial constraints,” she said.

John Ellis at King’s College London says the cuts tarnish the UK’s reputation among international scientific collaborators. “That’s not the way forwards for international collaboration, and it risks labelling the UK as an unreliable partner,” he says. “People are going to say, ‘Well, look, how do we know that Perfidious Albion is actually going to do what it says it’s going to do?'”

An LHC experiment known as LHCb, which is investigating differences between matter and antimatter, will have its budget cut to zero, says Ellis, which jeopardises plans to upgrade the detectors. Reports suggest that the US-led Electron-Ion Collider, being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, is another affected project.

“International partnerships are crucial for research and innovation, and UKRI remains committed to our existing international obligations – including as the second largest international contributor to CERN,” said a statement issued by UKRI. “Following the spending review that gave UKRI a record four-year settlement to deliver a new mission, UKRI is reforming to align with national priorities. At the same time curiosity driven research will continue to make up around 50% of our funding.” It added that a decision about future infrastructure projects being funded will be announced shortly.

Ellis says the wider cuts to physics research could have long-term implications for the UK, as postdoctoral and junior researcher positions will be lost. “What you risk doing is cutting a whole generation of our young researchers off at the knees,” he says. “It’s not going to be a minor effect.”

Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey, UK, warned that the impact of the cuts would reduce the knowledge, skill and experience available to run the country’s nuclear industry, as well as affect general research. “These proposed cuts are going to be devastating for our community,” he says. “If this goes through, the impact on the core programme will be catastrophic.”

Alicia Greated at the Campaign for Science and Engineering, which represents UK research bodies, says UKRI has made mistakes in how it communicated the cuts, which led to significant confusion and uncertainty. “Regardless of the rationale behind the decision to make savings in the STFC budget, which we do need further clarity on, the impact is the same,” she says. “STFC facilities support all research in the UK, not just that in the physical sciences. Less money for them could undermine a critical part of our research infrastructure.”

Article amended on 9 February 2026

We removed inaccurate details about projects and groups being affected and added a statement from UKRI. %!s()

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Quantum computers may eventually harness quantum phenomena to complete calculations that are intractable for the world’s best conventional computers. Similarly, a simulator harnessing quantum phenomena could help researchers to accurately model poorly understood materials or molecules.

This is especially true for materials such as superconductors, which conduct electricity with nearly perfect efficiency, because they derive this property from quantum effects that could be directly implemented on quantum simulators but would require more steps of mathematical translation on conventional devices.

Michelle Simmons at Silicon Quantum Computing in Australia and her colleagues have now created the biggest quantum simulator for quantum materials yet, called Quantum Twins. “The scale and controllability we have achieved with these simulators means we are now poised to tackle some very interesting problems,” she says. “We are designing new materials in previously unthought-of ways by literally building their analogues atom by atom.”

The researchers built several simulators by embedding atoms of phosphorus into silicon chips. Each atom became a quantum bit, or qubit, which is the basic building block of quantum computers and simulators, and the team could precisely arrange the qubits into different grids that emulated atoms’ arrangement in real materials. Each iteration of Quantum Twins was made up of a square grid of 15,000 qubits – more than any previous quantum simulator. Similar qubit arrays have previously been created from, for example, several thousands of extremely cold atoms.

Through this patterning process and by adding electronic components to each chip, the researchers also controlled properties of electrons in the chip. This mimicked controlling electrons in simulated materials, which is crucial for understanding, for instance, the flow of electricity within them. For example, the researchers could tune how difficult it would be to add an electron to any point in the grid or how difficult it would be for an electron to “hop” between two points.

Simmons says conventional computers struggle with simulating large two-dimensional systems, as well as certain combinations of electrons’ properties, but Quantum Twins simulators have shown promise for those cases. She and her team tested their chips by simulating a transition between metallic (or conducting) and insulating behaviour of a famous mathematical model for how “dirt” in a material can affect its ability to support electric currents. They also measured the system’s “Hall coefficient” as a function of temperature, which captures how the simulated material behaves when exposed to magnetic fields.

The size of the devices used in the experiment and the team’s ability to control variables mean Quantum Twins simulators could go on to tackle unconventional superconductors next, says Simmons. How conventional superconductors work at the level of their electrons is relatively well understood, but they must be made extremely cold or put under tremendous pressure to superconduct, which is impractical. Some superconductors can work in milder conditions, but to engineer them to function at room temperature and pressure, researchers need to understand them more microscopically – the kind of understanding that quantum simulators could offer in the future.

Additionally, Quantum Twins could be used to study interfaces between different metals and molecules similar to polyacetylene that could be useful for drug development or artificial photosynthesis devices, says Simmons. %!s()

One of the more absurd things about science is that you can spend years studying and reading about the universe’s deepest mysteries – dark matter, quantum gravity, the nature of time – and still get tripped up by something deceptively simple. Nobel-prizewinning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously confessed that as a student he didn’t really understand why mirrors flip images left to right rather than up and down. I’m no Feynman; I know how mirrors work. But I’ve had my own humbling reckoning with the obvious: temperature.

We’ve known that things can be hot or cold since the first cave-child stuck their hand in a fire and got yelled at by a concerned parent. But what we mean by temperature has changed a lot over the centuries, and continues to evolve today, as physicists push it into weirder, quantum corners.

My own brush with this came by way of my partner, who once asked: “My beautiful and stunningly intelligent wife, didn’t you study physics? Then tell me, can a single particle have a temperature?” I may be paraphrasing here slightly, but that was basically his question.

Now, his initial hunch was right: no, it can’t, not really. Most science enthusiasts know that temperature isn’t something you can assign to just one particle. The business of hot and cold only makes sense as a property of systems with many, many particles – things like gas-filled pistons, pots of coffee or stars. That’s because temperature, as we normally define it, is a kind of shorthand. It captures the average energy of a system’s microscopic components once they’ve bounced around and spread their energy out evenly, reaching a state known as equilibrium.

Imagine it like a ladder, with each rung representing a different energy level. The higher the rung, the more energy a particle has. When there are lots of particles, we expect them to be spread out across the rungs predictably. Most particles settle near the bottom, a few have enough energy to climb one rung higher, and fewer higher than that. The result is a smooth, declining number of particles as you go up the ladder.

But why do we define temperature this way? Sure, it’s an average, but there’s nothing in mathematics that forbids us from taking the mean of a dataset with a single point. If there’s one tall person in a room, we don’t blink at calling the average height of people in that room 6 feet. Why not do the same here?

It’s because temperature isn’t just descriptive, it’s predictive. For the scientists trying to harness the power of fuel, fire and steam in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was most useful for a temperature to tell them what would happen when two systems interacted.

That’s what gave rise to the zeroth law of thermodynamics, the last of these laws to be established but the most fundamental. It goes like this: if a thermometer reaches 80°C in a cup of warm water, and also reaches 80°C in a cup of warm milk, then if we mix the two liquids, there should be no net exchange of heat between them. This might sound obvious – banal, even – but it’s the bedrock of classical thermometry.

And it only holds because large systems behave in statistically stable ways. Tiny fluctuations in energy between specific particles get washed out and the law of large numbers allows us to write generalisable outcomes.

Thermodynamics is strange in that way. Unlike, say, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, which work just fine for one falling apple or a thousand, thermodynamic laws only emerge at scale. They rely on averages, ensembles and the mathematical magic that happens when your particle count climbs into the billions.

So: single particles don’t have temperatures. Case closed.

Or so I thought. But just when I felt ready to move on, physics threw me a curveball. The first dead giveaway that things are about to get really weird is that many quantum systems are composed of very few particles that never have stable properties.

Tiny systems – like individual atoms or singular spins – can be trapped states that never really settle. Some are even deliberately engineered to resist the peaceful state of equilibrium entirely. So, if temperature is supposed to describe what happens after things calm down, then doesn’t our definition of temperature fall apart?

Physicists have been working hard to retool temperature from the foundations up, considering what it even means to have temperature in the quantum realm.

In the same spirit as the pioneers of thermodynamics, researchers are now asking not what temperature is but what it does. If we take a quantum system and connect it to something else, which way does the heat move? Can the system warm up its neighbour? Can it cool it down?

In the quantum world, the answer can be both! Let’s go back to the temperature ladder that particles can climb. In the classical world, the rules of temperature here are simple. When two ladders (two systems) interact, energy always flows from the system with more particles on higher rungs to the one with fewer.

But a quantum system doesn’t obey the same rules. Quantum systems could have no particles on the bottom rung, and instead have them all crowded on rungs higher up. They could have patchy distributions of particles equally spread out on all rungs. Superposition also makes it possible for particles to exist between rungs. When quantum mechanics comes into play, our ladder is no longer what physicists call “thermally ordered”.

This makes it hard to predict how heat might flow if one ladder were to interact with something. To deal with that, physicists have developed a curious solution: let quantum systems have two temperatures. Imagine a sort of reference ladder that represents a simple thermal system. One temperature tells you the hottest such ladder your system can still pull heat down from. The other tells you the coldest ladder that your system can push heat up to. Outside this bracket, heat flows in a predictable direction, but inside it, the outcome depends on the exact nature of the quantum system. It’s the new zeroth law of thermodynamics, something that can help us restore logic to how heat flows in the quantum world.

These two bounds reflect the system’s potential to give or take energy, regardless of whether it’s in a state of equilibrium. Crucially, these temperatures depend not just on energy, but on how that energy is structured: how quantum particles or states are distributed across energy levels, and what kind of transitions the whole system supports.

And like their thermodynamical predecessors, quantum physicists are interested in making their systems do work. Imagine two atoms that are entangled – their properties are so closely correlated that measuring one affects the other. Now expose one atom to the environment. When that atom gains or loses energy, it tugs on the invisible quantum link connecting the pair. Breaking or degrading that link has a cost, like snapping a stretched rubber band. This creates a flow of heat that wouldn’t happen without the quantum link, which can then be harnessed – by coupling the atom to a tiny quantum “piston” – to perform work, until the entanglement is used up. By assigning hot and cold effective temperatures to any quantum state, researchers can determine when a system can reliably transfer heat, extract work or drive tasks such as refrigeration and computation.

If you’ve made it this far, here’s my confession: I argued with my partner that a single particle could have temperature, despite his intuition being correct. Being a sore loser sent me spiralling down a major rabbit hole – and at the bottom, I’ve found that we’re both right, sort of. A single particle can’t have a temperature, but it can have two. %!s()