Perspectives in 2025

Radiacoustic imaging uses ultrasound waves generated by radiation energy deposition for imaging contrast. This Perspective highlights advances, mechanisms, and biomedical and materials science applications, and outlines challenges and opportunities for this emerging imaging technology.

Multidimensional photonic computing is a framework that combines classical and quantum approaches, leveraging the properties of light. This Perspective explores its potential to enable scalable, neuromorphic photonic quantum systems suited to data-intensive and complex computational tasks.

Randomness is used in many applications where unpredictability is often paramount to ensure fairness and security. This Perspective discusses how quantum computation can generate certified randomness that can be verified by any participant and introduces several applications that can benefit from it.

In recent years, notable theoretical and experimental progress has been made in understanding both the classical and quantum versions of the Mpemba effect, in which a hotter system freezes faster than a cooler one. This Perspective discusses this phenomenon in open and isolated quantum systems.

Against a backdrop of global energy demands, it would be helpful to accelerate the transition of fusion energy from laboratory experiments to working power plants. This Perspective discusses areas of fusion energy research that are benefitting from supercomputing, such as simulations of complex plasma behaviour and materials under extreme conditions.

Excitonic condensation occurs when electrons and holes in closely placed bilayers form bound pairs and condense into a coherent quantum state. This Perspective highlights recent experimental breakthroughs and emerging directions in the rapidly evolving field of excitonic condensation in van der Waals bilayer systems.

This Perspective provides a brief, opinionated review of the past, present and future of the convergence between supercomputing and fusion simulations. We discuss the progress that has been made, the challenges that have been overcome and those that remain as we move into the post-exascale era.

Programmable metasurfaces may offer a transformative approach to scalable photonic neural networks by overcoming key hardware limitations. This Perspective explores their potential to enhance energy efficiency, computation speed, and adaptability, positioning them as a promising alternative to traditional digital artificial intelligence hardware.

Non-centrosymmetric ferroelectric and piezoelectric halide perovskites are an ideal model system to explore the photogalvanic effects. This Perspective discusses the opportunities and challenges of designing and harnessing photogalvanic effects in these materials towards unconventional devices for spin computing, sensing and solar energy applications.

The exascale era, driven by GPU-dominated architectures, demands a shift in quantum simulation software. This Perspective examines algorithm adaptation, software fragmentation, and the need for efficient GPU-optimized methods, standardized libraries and scalable programming models for high-performance quantum simulations.

Quantum computing outperforms classical computing on a number of tasks. This Perspective offers a view on the future potential of quantum computing to enhance simulations of nonlinear systems such as turbulent flows.

Although quantum computers are still in their infancy, their computational power is growing rapidly. This Perspective surveys and critiques the known ways to benchmark quantum computer performance, highlighting new challenges anticipated on the road to utility-scale quantum computing.

Integrating physics priors into machine learning enhances efficiency, reduces data needs and yields reliable results. This Perspective explores physics-driven learning and inverse modelling of generative models to provide solutions for inverse problem in quantum chromodynamics.

This Perspective explores how the frequency shifts of atomic spectral lines between isotopes can be effective probes of physics beyond the standard model, when measured to high precision using optical spectroscopy.