One of the important finds was a broken statuette of the goddess Victoria, the personification of victory. (Image credit: © Lars Görze MA, LfDH)When archaeologists first excavated the Kapersburg fort near the turn of the 20th century, they discovered that it was built in the early second century, likely under either Emperor Trajan, who ruled from A.D. 98 to 117, or Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from A.D. 117 to 138 and expanded the Roman Empire further into northern England, building Hadrian's Wall. The Kapersburg fort was used by a unit of Roman soldiers and cavalry for about a century and a half, until around A.D. 275.
Although the fort's defensive structures and some of its walls have been visible since antiquity, practically nothing was known about its nearby vicus prior to the excavations that began in 2024, according to Mückenberger.
"The astonishing thing is the exquisite preservation of the archaeological layers that start right beneath the forest floor," Mückenberger said. These layers, which include burnt material, almost never survive in agricultural areas but have been well preserved at the vicus. "This is an incredible learning process and a gain in knowledge for us," Mückenberger added.
During their excavations, the research team discovered far fewer houses than they expected. However, they found much more evidence of craft activities, such as blacksmith pits and ovens for drying wheat and baking bread.
"These are all very technical elements related to local services, indicating that we're in a kind of intermediate area not directly adjacent to the fort itself, but perhaps more like the fort's craft area," Mückenberger said.
The temple and votive statues provide new insight into the Roman world of beliefs on the border of the empire, according to the statement. But when the fort was no longer useful, the Romans leveled the camp and replaced it with residential buildings, the archaeologists discovered.
Mückenberger and his team plan to continue their excavation of the site next year.
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'> 1,800-year-old temple to Mars and statue of Victory unearthed at Roman military fort in Germany
This burial urn depicts a person, accompanied by skulls, as they are received into the Maya underworld. (Image credit: The Walters Art Museum; (CC0 1.0 Universal))QUICK FACTS
Name: Urn with jaguars and skulls
What it is: A ceramic burial urn
Where it is from: Guatemala
When it was made: Circa A.D. 600 to 900
This colorful ceramic urn depicts a person wearing a jaguar costume and surrounded by human skulls, about to be received into the Maya underworld. The urn once held the bones of an ancestor for their descendants to venerate.
The urn was anonymously gifted to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in 2008. According to the museum, the urn is about 17.5 inches (44.5 centimeters) tall and was likely produced in Guatemala by the K'iche' Maya people more than a millennium ago. Originally, the urn probably had an elaborate lid that was tied on with string through the loops near the lip of the vessel, but it is now missing.
The decoration on the urn is striking. A person wearing a jaguar costume splashed with blood — claws and teeth bared — looks out at the viewer from the center of the urn. This individual may be a deceased ruler who is entering the world of the dead, which is symbolized by two pairs of human skulls and the dark figures of two Maya gods of the underworld. Behind the underworld gods are raised spikes representing thorns of the tropical kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra).
The Maya believed that the kapok tree, which was also called the Maya "world tree" or the Yaxche, had roots in the aquatic underworld, so its depiction on this funerary urn may reflect how it is a conduit between realms, according to The Walters Art Museum. Jaguars also held important spiritual meaning to the Maya; they were thought to move fluidly between the three realms — sky, Earth and underworld. Therefore, the depiction of the deceased ruler wearing a jaguar costume to enter the underworld may have suggested that they could also mediate between the world of the living and the Maya gods.
This colorful and symbol-laden urn shows that death was not an ending for the Maya, according to The Walters Art Museum, and that the urn "serves as a graphic reminder of how the dissolution of the body could be a positive change, transforming a beloved ancestor into an honored spirit who would continue to guide the living for eternity."
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'> Urn with jaguars and skulls: A 1,400-year-old burial container depicting a deceased ruler's arrival to the Maya underworld
That's why the scientists pioneered Quantum Phononic Links (QPLs) — an approach for long-range coupling between qubits that leans on phonons — quasiparticles that carry vibration energy — to convey information. By contrast, conventional methods, like surface acoustic waves — high-frequency sound vibrations — demand complex designs and extra hardware.
"One of the key challenges in quantum computing is long-range qubit connectivity," Maksym Myronov, an associate professor of semiconductor materials and devices at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and first author of the study, said in a statement. "Our work introduces a new concept in which phonons act as a quantum bus, enabling distant qubits to exchange quantum information while remaining fully compatible with semiconductor technology."
In the study, the scientists said the most promising way to achieve a quantum computer that's capable of large-scale processing and takes advantage of QPLs would be a qubit modality known as "semiconductor hole spin qubits."
A "hole" here refers to the absence of an electron in a material, but it can act like a particle and have a spin state — a property used to encode quantum information — where the 1s and 0s of data would be represented by the direction of the particle's spin state.
To demonstrate this technology, they created a prototype QPU consisting of silicon with a thin germanium crystal layer, a specialized material they called compressively strained germanium on silicon (cs-GoS). Germanium is an especially useful material for quantum computing, the scientists said, as it has natural properties that reduce decoherence — the loss of quantum information due to external interference.
Hole spin qubits combine long quantum coherence times — how long they can retain quantum information — with the ability to communicate using electron impulses in control systems. But they struggle to form bonds and share quantum information with qubits they don't directly neighbor. In any large-scale system, for instance, enabling this "quantum coupling" between distant qubits is essential for quantum error correction techniques to work effectively across the breadth of a massive system, the scientists said.
Other proposed long-range communications approaches, such as "charge shunting" — redirecting capacitors to reduce sensitivity to charge noise, or surface acoustic waves — have fundamental limitations regarding scalability, both in terms of their size and in maintaining coherence. That's where QPLs come in.
QPLs are engineered phononic waveguides and cavities that both confine and guide acoustic modes within a compressively strained germanium "quantum well," where a quantum well is an ultrathin layer that acts as a guide.
In the study, the researchers focused on qubits using valence-band holes — the absence of electrons at absolute zero — hosted using cs-GoS. With QPLs, the scientists sent sound-like vibrations through the specialized material to carry quantum information between the distant qubits.
Spin states in this material are highly sensitive to lattice deformations, which enable precise control and the coupling of spin states with vibrational energy. Essentially, this allows the spin state to be distinguishable from its electron counterpart, enabling the phononic coupling strategies. The technique they adopted permitted direct coupling between the phonons and the hole spins.
By using a slow wave velocity (the speed of a quantum particle) and a short wavelength for acoustic excitations, the scientists used QPLs to link qubits separated by less than a micrometer (one-thousandth of a millimeter) and those up to 300 mm (11.8 inches) apart.
QPLs are not only promising for quantum computing, the scientists pointed out in the study. By utilizing phonons as the connections, this technique offers a versatile interface for hybrid quantum systems — conventional computers with quantum computing functionality. This could enable coherent interconnection of semiconductor spin qubits with other quantum platforms, such as cloud-based quantum computing.
The combination of phononic engineering and hole-spin physics makes cs-GoS a promising platform for next-generation quantum architectures, they added, since it could achieve both long-range coherent coupling and large-scale integration.
Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!
'> New quantum chip taps into weird quasiparticles to get qubits to communicate over long distances filled the universe in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.
Physicists want to pin down how this soup-ification happened, by measuring the so-called equation of state of nuclear matter. "For water, it tells you how pressure, temperature and density are linked, and therefore when it freezes, boils or expands," study co-author Rutik Manikandhan, a postdoctoral physics scholar at The Ohio State University, told Live Science in an email. For nuclear matter, "it is the basic rulebook for matter under the most extreme conditions in nature, such as the cores of neutron stars," Manikandhan added.
The "critical point" is a key landmark in that rulebook "For water, it is the point where the boundary between liquid and steam disappears," Manikandhan said, and theorists have long suspected that nuclear matter has a similar point. At extremely high temperatures, matter melts smoothly and gradually into quark-gluon plasma, but at higher densities, the change may become abrupt.
The critical point would mark where one kind of transition turns into the other. Some recent calculations place this point within reach of RHIC's lower-energy collisions. "But all of this is still conjectured and there is nothing concrete yet, either from the experimentalists or theorists," Manikandhan said.
The work also matters for cosmology. "Because the matter we create in these collisions resembles the matter that filled the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang, mapping how it behaves helps us understand how the universe evolved from a hot soup of quarks and gluons into the protons and neutrons that make up everything today," Manikandhan said.
The central part of the three-story STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Scientists recently used the detector to study the conditions of the early universe, just milliseconds after the Big Bang. (Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)A dip where a smooth trend was expected
To explore this territory, the researchers ran RHIC at a range of collision energies. The lower the energy, the more tightly the colliding matter was squeezed. For its lowest-energy runs, STAR used a "fixed-target" setup, in which a beam of gold nuclei strikes "a thin gold foil placed inside the detector," Manikandhan said, instead of a second, oncoming beam. This produces the densest matter RHIC can make.
Collision energies are measured in electron volts (the energy an electron gains when accelerated across 1 volt). That is a minuscule amount, so particle physicists usually work in billions of electron volts, or giga electron volts (GeV). One GeV is roughly the energy locked up in the mass of a single proton, according to Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. The team analyzed roughly 1 billion collisions at energies between 3 and 7.7 GeV per pair of colliding protons or neutrons. That is the bottom of RHIC's range, which reaches 200 GeV.
In each collision, the team measured how hard charged particles were flung sideways out of the fireball — a quantity known as transverse momentum. The researchers then looked for correlations between the particles. A correlation measures whether two things tend to change together. Here, the team checked whether pairs of particles from the same collision tended to both be flung harder than average, or both more gently. That reveals something about the fireball as a whole. If a fireball is slightly hotter, or expands more forcefully, all of its particles get an extra sideways kick together.
"Those correlations reflect how much the temperature and the flow of the fireball fluctuate," Manikandhan said.
Close to a critical point, the matter's heat capacity — the amount of energy needed to raise its temperature — is expected to shoot up. That makes the fireball's temperature harder to budge, so the correlations should weaken. "If the matter approaches a critical point or a phase change, we would expect to see those correlations change in an unusual, non-smooth way as we vary the collision energy," Manikandhan said.
That is what the team saw in the most head-on collisions. "Instead of changing smoothly with energy, the correlations show a dip," Manikandhan said. The researchers compared the data with a smooth trend anchored by earlier STAR measurements at higher energies. The dip departs from that trend with a statistical significance of 5 sigma, the standard physicists usually demand before treating a signal as real. It means that if the true trend were smooth, random scatter in the data would produce such a pronounced dip only about once in 3.5 million tries.
"A smooth trend is what you'd expect from ordinary nuclear matter, so a dip suggests something more interesting is happening at those conditions," Manikandhan said.
By contrast, a widely used computer simulation of the collisions, which contains no critical point, reproduced the overall trend but not the dip. Off-center collisions showed only a faint hint of the same feature, which is too weak to count as evidence on its own.
Not the final word yet
"The result is suggestive, not proof of a critical point," Manikandhan said. Effects unrelated to a critical point can also shape these fluctuations, and how much of the dip they could explain remains unclear, the researchers noted.
Still, the dip "does point to a set of conditions where the behavior of nuclear matter changes, and it gives theorists a new, precise measurement to test their calculations against," Manikandhan said.
Next, the team plans to use the correlations to "extract the specific heat of the hot matter," Manikandhan said. They will then compare it with supercomputer simulations that calculate the behavior of quarks and gluons from first principles.
The researchers also plan to test the dip against more theoretical models and combine it with other measurements, such as fluctuations in the number of protons produced in the collisions. "Only when different measurements agree can we say confidently whether a critical point exists," Manikandhan said.
'> Scientists recreate the universe's first moments and find something they didn't expect