The Aharonov-Bohm effect, predicted in 1959 by Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm, is a striking illustration of how quantum mechanics departs from everyday intuition. In classical physics, the motion of a charged particle is determined locally by the electric and magnetic fields it actually encounters. If a particle never passes through a region containing a magnetic field, classical reasoning says that field should have no influence on it whatsoever. Quantum mechanics allows something far stranger: a charged particle travelling around, rather than through, a region of magnetic flux acquires a measurable phase shift, a subtle change in the character of its quantum state that leaves a detectable fingerprint even though the particle never touched the field itself. The prediction was later confirmed in experiments with real electrons, and it has since become a foundational touchstone of quantum theory, revealing that the potentials describing electromagnetic fields carry physical significance beyond the fields’ local values.

What has excited physicists in recent years is the prospect of seeing this effect emerge in an entirely different theoretical setting: lattice gauge theories. These mathematical frameworks describe how matter interacts with gauge fields, the entities that mediate the fundamental forces of nature, and they underpin many of the most important models in particle and high-energy physics. In a lattice gauge theory, matter sits at the points of a grid, while the fields live on the links connecting those points, creating a discrete scaffolding on which the dynamics of particles and forces can be studied. The Aharonov-Bohm effect should manifest in such systems when a matter particle moves around a loop pierced by magnetic flux, but observing this directly requires a level of control and fidelity that has been difficult to achieve.

The obstacle is computational. As lattice gauge theories grow in size and complexity, their behaviour becomes increasingly difficult to calculate on classical computers, because the quantum states involved grow exponentially with the number of degrees of freedom. Quantum computers offer a fundamentally different approach. Rather than solving the full dynamics numerically, researchers build a physical system that obeys the same quantum rules as the theory they wish to study and simply observe what it does. This strategy, known as quantum simulation, exploits the fact that nature can compute its own behaviour far more efficiently than any classical machine can approximate it. For gauge theories, which lie at the heart of the standard model of particle physics, quantum simulation promises access to regimes that have remained beyond theoretical reach for decades.

Beginning in 2022, lead author Dr Sebastian Saner, Dr Oana Bazavan and colleagues in Oxford’s Department of Physics, working with Dr Alejandro Bermudez of the Instituto de Física Teórica in Madrid, developed an experiment to simulate lattice gauge theories using a hybrid quantum system. The word hybrid is key: their platform combined two kinds of quantum component, each playing a distinct physical role. Qubits, quantum bits encoded in the internal states of trapped ions, represented the gauge fields, while quantum oscillators, the collective vibrations of those same ions, represented the matter. This division of labour allowed the team to map the structure of a gauge theory onto hardware that could faithfully reproduce its dynamics, with the trapped-ion platform providing the exquisite control and long coherence times needed to watch subtle quantum interference unfold.

Using this encoding, the researchers constructed a loop, the elementary building block of the theory, from two oscillators representing matter at two points, connected by two qubits representing the fields between them. The geometry is deliberately minimal, yet it contains everything needed to display the Aharonov-Bohm effect: a closed path for matter to traverse and gauge fields threading the route. The team then prepared the two qubits in an entangled quantum state, in which their properties are linked in a way that has no classical equivalent. In the language of the lattice gauge theory, this entangled state corresponds to a magnetic flux piercing the loop, exactly the configuration needed to test whether matter moving around the loop would sense a field it never entered.

Producing such a flux in the conventional way, as a fixed background imposed on the system, would have required an interaction the hardware could not provide. Encoding the flux in the qubits began, therefore, as a practical workaround, a way of achieving the desired configuration within the constraints of the experimental platform. But the workaround turned out to be the more interesting route. ‘For us, the exciting step was to encode the magnetic flux in a gauge field that was itself dynamical,’ says Dr Saner. ‘Rather than having matter evolve in a fixed background, the matter and gauge field become part of the same quantum dynamics.’ This means the flux is not a static prop but a living component of the simulated universe, free to participate in the evolution of the system, which is precisely the situation that arises in genuine gauge theories of the fundamental forces.

With the dynamical flux in place, the researchers watched a matter particle tunnel around the loop, and the results were unambiguous. When no flux was present, the particle tunnelled freely, moving between the two matter sites as expected. When the flux was present, the two paths around the loop interfered destructively, cancelling each other out and suppressing the tunnelling completely. The system was left frozen in its starting state, a dramatic and directly observable consequence of a magnetic field the particle never passed through. This was the experimental demonstration of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a dynamical setting within a lattice gauge theory, confirming that the subtle phase physics predicted more than sixty years ago carries over intact into the discrete, dynamical world of simulated gauge fields.

The Oxford paper appears alongside related work from a group at the University of Maryland led by Professor Norbert Linke, which used a hybrid quantum system to simulate the Yukawa potential, an interaction relevant to nuclear and particle physics. The two groups developed their approaches independently before coordinating their submissions to Nature Physics, and together the studies highlight the growing potential of hybrid qubit-oscillator architectures for simulating fundamental interactions that are difficult to tackle classically. The convergence of independent teams on similar hybrid strategies suggests the approach is robust and broadly applicable, offering a flexible template for future simulations of increasingly complex gauge theories.

The significance of the work extends well beyond the confirmation of a single effect. Gauge theories form the mathematical backbone of the standard model, and understanding their dynamics in regimes where classical computation fails is one of the central challenges of modern physics, with implications ranging from the behaviour of quarks inside protons to the properties of matter in extreme astrophysical environments. By showing that a hybrid quantum computer can host a dynamical gauge field, entangle it with matter, and reveal the interference signatures that define gauge physics, the Oxford team has demonstrated a working pathway toward simulating theories that have resisted classical treatment since their formulation. The frozen particle in their tiny loop is a small system, but it points toward a future in which quantum simulators illuminate the fundamental forces on their own quantum terms, answering questions that no classical machine, however large, could ever hope to address.

Subject of Research: Quantum simulation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a lattice gauge theory using a hybrid qubit-oscillator quantum computer

Article Title: Hybrid quantum computer observes foundational quantum effect in a new setting

Article References: Hybrid quantum computer observes foundational quantum effect in a new setting. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Aharonov-Bohm effect, quantum simulation, lattice gauge theory, hybrid quantum computer, trapped ions, qubits, quantum oscillators, gauge fields, University of Oxford, Nature Physics, quantum interference, particle physics

The β-lactam ring is one of the most remarkable structures in all of chemistry. It is a four-membered ring under enormous strain, and that strain is precisely what gives β-lactam antibiotics their power. When the molecule reaches a bacterium, the reactive ring interferes with the enzymes that build the bacterial cell wall. Unable to maintain its protective envelope, the cell ruptures and dies. Every penicillin, cephalosporin and carbapenem in the clinical arsenal depends on this chemical trick. Yet for decades, scientists studying how nature assembles this ring have been frustrated by a fundamental obstacle: the key reaction intermediates exist for only tiny fractions of a second, far too briefly to be observed with conventional structural biology methods, which rely on static snapshots of stable states.

The Oxford-led team overcame this barrier with an ingenious experimental design built around X-ray free-electron lasers, instruments that generate ultrashort, extraordinarily intense X-ray pulses capable of recording atomic-resolution images before radiation damage destroys the sample. The researchers prepared thousands of tiny microcrystals of IPNS bound to its substrate under oxygen-free conditions, since the enzyme requires oxygen to trigger the reaction but must not encounter it prematurely. These crystals were deposited as microscopic droplets onto a moving tape just two millimeters wide. As the tape swept through an oxygen-filled chamber, oxygen diffused rapidly into the crystals, initiating the catalytic reaction simultaneously across the entire sample. By precisely tuning the speed of the tape, the team controlled exactly how long each crystal had been reacting by the time it reached the X-ray interaction point, where a single ultrafast pulse captured an atomic-resolution snapshot of that instant.

Repeating this procedure at many different reaction times and combining thousands of individual snapshots, the researchers assembled a complete, time-resolved sequence of the catalytic process, effectively a molecular movie spanning milliseconds to seconds. Crucially, the technique works at physiological temperature and pressure, meaning the enzyme was filmed under conditions close to those inside a living organism rather than in a frozen or chemically trapped state. Each frame revealed a distinct stage of the transformation, allowing the team to watch, in atomic detail, how IPNS folds and oxidizes its linear peptide substrate into the bicyclic penicillin scaffold in a single, extraordinarily complex catalytic step.

Among the stages captured were two intermediates never directly observed before. The first was a thioaldehyde, a reactive sulfur-containing species formed immediately before the β-lactam ring closes. The second was a monocyclic β-lactam intermediate, the first ring-shaped structure on the pathway to the finished antibiotic. These observations provide the clearest picture yet of how IPNS, an iron-dependent enzyme, choreographs one of the most demanding transformations in natural product biosynthesis. The results overturn long-held assumptions about the sequence of chemical events and demonstrate that the enzyme guides its substrate through a series of carefully controlled, high-energy states that no static structure could ever reveal.

Perhaps the most surprising finding concerns water. The study showed that water molecules buried within the enzyme play an active role in steering the reaction, shuttling protons at critical junctures. Subtle movements rippling through the protein scaffold help position these waters and the substrate itself, indicating that the enzyme’s shape and its chemistry operate as an integrated system. Enzyme motion, iron coordination chemistry and water-mediated proton transfer are thus woven together in a precisely timed sequence. This holistic view of catalysis, in which the protein architecture actively participates in the chemistry rather than merely hosting it, offers a much richer framework for understanding how enzymes achieve such remarkable precision.

The significance of the work extends well beyond satisfying historical curiosity. Antimicrobial resistance, the process by which bacteria and other microorganisms evolve to survive the drugs designed to kill them, is steadily undermining existing antibiotics. The World Health Organization has warned that widespread resistance to common antibiotics is now a global reality, with resistance reported in a substantial share of bacterial infections. Rising resistance threatens not only the treatment of infection itself but also the foundations of modern medicine: cancer chemotherapy, organ transplantation and major surgery all depend on the ability to prevent and control bacterial infection. With too few new antibiotics in the development pipeline, understanding exactly how nature builds these molecules is a strategic step toward replenishing it.

Professor Christopher Schofield, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a senior author of the paper, emphasized that penicillin still holds lessons for modern science. By capturing these fleeting steps, he noted, researchers can better understand how enzymes control complex chemistry with remarkable precision, and as resistance rates continue to rise, that understanding will ultimately help make existing antibiotics more efficient and support the design of entirely new antibiotic structures. Dr Patrick Rabe, Wellcome Career Development Award Investigator at Oxford and first author of the study, added that the ability to capture structural snapshots across milliseconds to seconds of reaction time allows scientists to connect enzyme motion, iron chemistry and proton transfer in a single coherent picture, and that knowing the process in atomic detail opens the door to engineering these enzymes to produce new or improved antibiotic scaffolds.

The technical achievement also reflects a broader shift in structural biology. Dr Allen M. Orville, group leader of the XFEL Hub at Diamond Light Source and a co-author, described how the collaboration combined specialist expertise in time-resolved X-ray methods with the capabilities of partner facilities to move beyond static structures and reveal enzymes at work in real time. Experiments were carried out at X-ray free-electron laser facilities on three continents, including the Linac Coherent Light Source in the United States, PAL-XFEL in the Republic of Korea, SACLA in Japan and Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom. The study drew together structural biology, spectroscopy, chemistry, computation and enzyme engineering, demonstrating a powerful general approach for observing fleeting chemical intermediates that were previously inaccessible, both in antibiotic biosynthesis and in other biologically important enzyme reactions.

There is a fitting historical resonance in the fact that Oxford has once again advanced the science of penicillin. It was there, during the Second World War, that the Nobel prize-winning scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, together with their colleagues, developed penicillin into the first clinically useful antibiotic, building on Alexander Fleming’s original discovery. It was also at Oxford that the Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin solved the structure of penicillin in 1945 using X-ray crystallography, laying the groundwork for the structural approach that made the new study possible. Beyond antibiotics, the findings carry implications for a wide family of iron-dependent oxygenase enzymes involved in human biology, including those that allow our cells to sense and respond to changes in oxygen availability. By revealing the principles through which one such enzyme executes an exceptionally difficult transformation, the molecular movie of penicillin biosynthesis offers new foundations for enzyme engineering and catalyst design, and a vivid reminder that even the most familiar medicines still guard secrets worth filming.

Subject of Research: Time-resolved X-ray free-electron laser observation of isopenicillin N synthase catalysis in penicillin biosynthesis

Article Title: Ingenious ‘molecular movie’ finally reveals how penicillin is made

Article References: Ingenious ‘molecular movie’ finally reveals how penicillin is made. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: penicillin, β-lactam antibiotics, isopenicillin N synthase, X-ray free-electron laser, time-resolved crystallography, enzyme catalysis, antimicrobial resistance, University of Oxford, Diamond Light Source, reaction intermediates, structural biology, Nature Catalysis

The research, known as the HERON study, was led by the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford together with the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Community Healthcare. Over five months, from June to November 2025, the team surveyed 314 people across all four nations of the United Kingdom, asking them to describe the biggest problems in respiratory care and the places where technology might help. The responses amounted to nearly 1,300 distinct challenges and ideas, which the researchers then sorted and refined into 73 separate areas where a device, app, test or data system could plausibly make a difference to care.

What happened next is what gives the study its force. Rather than simply publishing a wish list, the team checked each of the 73 areas against what already exists, ranging from early laboratory prototypes to products currently on sale. The results were stark. In 52 of the 73 areas, they found nothing adequate on the market or in development. A further 21 areas were only partly covered by existing technology. And not a single area met the demanding bar the study set itself: a suitable solution already in routine use at scale across the UK. The authors note that the picture may have shifted in the time since they completed their review, but the overall message is difficult to escape. The technology that patients and clinicians want most is, for the most part, not the technology being built.

This mismatch matters because the scale of respiratory disease in the UK is enormous. Around one in five people lives with a lung condition, making respiratory illness the third leading cause of death in the country and responsible for more than 700,000 hospital admissions each year. The burden falls disproportionately on poorer communities, where air quality, housing conditions and access to care combine to worsen outcomes, yet research funding has not kept pace with the scale of the problem. Meanwhile, the market for respiratory technology has grown quickly, but the products emerging from it have tended to follow what is technically possible rather than what users have asked for. Cutting-edge features, the study’s authors observe, do not always match what the people using those products actually want or need.

To break that pattern, the Oxford team adapted a method with a strong track record in a different field. The James Lind Alliance has long brought patients and clinicians together to agree which research questions matter most, a process known as priority setting. HERON turned that same participatory logic onto technology itself, defining the term broadly to include anything from a home lung-function test to a smartphone app to the data infrastructure behind a virtual ward. As far as the authors are aware, no one had previously described a systematic method of this kind for setting HealthTech priorities in chronic respiratory disease, making the study a methodological first as well as a practical roadmap.

The researchers were also deliberate about who they reached. Online surveys, however convenient, systematically miss many of the people most affected by lung disease, including those without reliable internet access, those with low literacy and those whose lives are consumed by managing illness. So alongside the survey, the team went into the community, attending pulmonary rehabilitation classes, a singing group for people living with breathlessness and a respiratory service for people who are homeless. These sessions took place in Greater Manchester, Norwich, Bristol, Nottingham and Weston-super-Mare, and were kept deliberately informal to lower the barriers to participation. The researchers did not collect demographic details at these sessions, so they cannot measure precisely how far they succeeded in broadening the sample, an honest limitation they acknowledge openly.

In March 2026, the longlist was put to the test. Twenty-three patients, carers and clinicians spent a day together working through the 73 areas and narrowing them down to a final top 20. The priorities span the whole journey of living with lung disease, from screening people who are at risk before symptoms become serious, through day-to-day management, to helping people maintain their gains after a course of pulmonary rehabilitation ends, a point at which support often abruptly stops. Some of the most striking items are strikingly modest in conception: an inhaler that shows when it is running out, oxygen equipment that can leave the house, a tool that helps separate anxiety from the onset of an exacerbation. Each addresses a failure point that patients describe constantly and that current devices simply ignore.

One demand cut across all twenty priorities, and the authors present it as the study’s central design principle. Whatever gets built has to work for someone with poor eyesight, unsteady hands or no confidence with a smartphone, and it has to be affordable to run, both for the National Health Service and for the patient. Accessibility, usability and equity, they argue, cannot be retrofitted late in development or bolted on as an afterthought; they need to be built in from the very start. Dr Helen Ashdown, an academic general practitioner at the University of Oxford who led the study, said that there is enormous potential for technology to improve respiratory care, but that simply developing more technology is not enough. HERON, she explained, identifies not only where the eventual users of technology think innovation could make the greatest difference, but also what they need from those technologies if they are going to work in real life.

The roadmap is already being put to work. The National Institute for Health and Care Research has opened its latest Invention for Innovation, or i4i FAST, funding opportunity for chronic respiratory health technology, and it explicitly encourages applicants to address the HERON priorities in their applications. That means the list is not merely an academic exercise but a live filter through which public research money will flow. The Respiratory Transformation Partnership, a national collaboration between the NHS, government and industry established to improve asthma and COPD care, is also supporting the findings, which will inform its considerations and help connect promising technologies with the needs of patients and respiratory services. Dr Jonathan Fuld, National Clinical Director for Respiratory Disease at NHS England and Chair of the partnership, said that patients should be at the heart of how new respiratory technologies are developed, and that by aligning innovation support with these priorities there is an opportunity to help promising technologies progress from development and evaluation through to adoption in the NHS.

The study was funded by LifeArc, a medical research charity, and its ambitions extend beyond the chest clinic. The method itself, the authors point out, is not tied to lungs. The same structured process of gathering challenges from patients, carers and clinicians, mapping them against the existing technology landscape and distilling a ranked set of priorities could be applied wherever HealthTech priorities need setting, from diabetes to dementia. If it catches on, the HERON study may be remembered less for its list of twenty technologies than for the question it forces the industry to answer before writing a single line of code or moulding a single prototype: who asked for this, and what did they actually say they needed? For the one in five people in the UK living with lung disease, and the clinicians trying to keep them out of hospital, the answer has never been spelled out so clearly.

Subject of Research: Patient and clinician priorities for respiratory health technology development in the UK

Article Title: Respiratory patients and clinicians name the 20 technologies they want most – and could transform NHS lung care

Article References: Respiratory patients and clinicians name the 20 technologies they want most – and could transform NHS lung care. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: respiratory disease, health technology, HERON study, University of Oxford, Thorax, patient priorities, NHS, inhalers, COPD, asthma, medical devices, NIHR

The central finding is striking: similar products made by different manufacturers can vary enormously in their nutritional and environmental profiles. A ready meal produced by one company might score far worse on both counts than a broadly comparable product sold by a rival. This variation matters because it means that the differences are not dictated by the category itself. If one manufacturer can produce a more nutritious and more sustainable version of a given food, then others in the same category can plausibly do the same. The gap between the best and worst performers within a product type represents, in effect, an untapped reservoir of public health and environmental benefit.

To quantify what could be gained from closing that gap, the authors modelled a scenario in which manufacturers replaced some of their least nutritious and least sustainable products with alternatives scoring closer to the average for their category. The results showed significant potential for improvement across the board. More remarkably, for many manufacturers, more than half of the total achievable improvement could be secured by reformulating or replacing just 10 percent or less of their product line. In other words, a relatively small number of targeted changes could deliver the majority of the benefit, a finding that reframes portfolio reform as a tractable, near-term opportunity rather than a distant aspiration.

The study is, according to its authors, the first of its kind to assess the capacity of food and beverage manufacturers to support both nutrition and environmental sustainability through changes within their existing product portfolios. Lead author Eleanor Hammond, who conducted the research while working at the University of Oxford, explained that the analysis was designed around what companies could realistically do without inventing entirely new product categories. That focus on the existing portfolio is what gives the findings their practical force: the improvements identified do not depend on breakthrough technologies or consumer behaviour change, but on decisions about which products to keep, reformulate, or retire.

The distribution of improvement potential across companies is far from uniform. The researchers found that two well-known British supermarkets, whose own brands collectively account for 28.9 percent of the sales value in the analysis, have some of the largest scope to improve their scores for both environment and nutrition. Broad product ranges spanning many categories give these retailers many opportunities to lift weaker performers toward the standard set by their better products. By contrast, manufacturers with narrow product ranges, such as snack and energy drink producers, generally have less room to improve their scores, since their portfolios offer fewer substitution possibilities and their categories may already sit near the average for the market.

Co-author Dr Michael Clark, Associate Professor in Sustainable Food Solutions at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, framed the findings in terms of the wider transformation that food systems must undergo in the coming decades. If food systems are to transition to more nutritious and environmentally sustainable outcomes, he noted, food manufacturers are going to have to change the products they sell. That change, he argued, can either be driven by the manufacturers themselves or imposed on them by government policy. The study’s results, he said, show that manufacturers can get a head start on this necessary transition by making small changes to their product portfolios today, rather than waiting for regulation to compel action.

The timing of the research is significant. The UK Government is currently under pressure to bring forward legislation requiring mandatory reporting on the nutrition of UK food and beverage products, and the study offers a template for how such reporting could work in practice. According to Dr Clark, the study demonstrates how the UK Government could monitor both sustainability and nutritional outcomes together, rather than treating them as separate policy problems. He added that the approach could also be used for ESG reporting and could support regulatory frameworks such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which requires large companies to disclose detailed information about their environmental and social impacts.

Methodologically, the study is an observational analysis rather than an intervention trial, but its scale gives it considerable weight. Assigning per-100-gram scores for both nutrition and sustainability to the full product ranges of 44 major manufacturers required a systematic assessment of a large share of the UK food retail market, covering approximately 50 percent of sales. Because the scoring was applied consistently across products and companies, the resulting variation cannot be dismissed as an artefact of differing assessment methods. The consistency of the measurement is precisely what allows the authors to compare improvement potential across manufacturers with very different portfolio structures, from diversified retailers to specialist snack producers.

The implications extend beyond the United Kingdom. Food manufacturers everywhere face mounting pressure from investors, regulators, and consumers to demonstrate progress on health and sustainability, yet many have struggled to identify where meaningful change is possible without disrupting their businesses. This study suggests a concrete answer: audit the portfolio, identify the products that fall furthest below category averages on nutrition and sustainability, and prioritise those for reformulation or replacement. Because the analysis shows that a small fraction of products carries a large share of the improvement potential, the approach offers companies a way to achieve substantial, measurable gains with limited commercial disruption. For policymakers, the same data infrastructure could underpin monitoring schemes that hold manufacturers accountable over time.

What makes the findings resonate is their simplicity. The debate over food system transformation is often dominated by visions of radical change, from novel proteins to wholesale dietary shifts, all of which face long timelines and uncertain adoption. This research points to something more immediate: the products that companies already make, and the gaps between them. If a ready meal from one manufacturer can be substantially more nutritious and sustainable than a similar product from another, then the knowledge and capability to produce better food already exists within the industry. The task, as the Oxford team frames it, is to close those gaps deliberately and quickly, whether through voluntary corporate action or through the reporting requirements now being considered by governments. With more than half the potential improvement available from changing just a tenth of a product line, the study makes a compelling case that the food industry’s next big contribution to public and planetary health may come not from new inventions, but from smarter choices about the products it already sells.

Subject of Research: Nutritional and environmental sustainability scoring of UK food and beverage manufacturers' product portfolios

Article Title: Food & drink manufacturers can greatly improve sustainability and healthiness of their products with small changes – Oxford research

Article References: Food & drink manufacturers can greatly improve sustainability and healthiness of their products with small changes – Oxford research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: food manufacturers, sustainability, nutrition, University of Oxford, Nature Food, UK food retail, product portfolios, ESG reporting, food policy, ready meals, supermarkets, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive