Volume 1 Issue 9, September 2019

Detector technologies developed at CERN can produce stunning colour X-ray computed tomography images, but bringing them to hospitals is challenging.

In positron emission tomography, up to 40% of positron annihilation occurs through the production of positronium atoms in the patient’s body, whose decay could provide information about disease progression. New research is needed to take full advantage of this information.

Each year millions of patients benefit from diagnostic services enabled by advances in medical imaging. However, some services rely on the supply of technetium-99m from an ageing nuclear infrastructure. Kevin Charlton discusses new technologies to secure a sustainable supply.

Jose R. Alonso and colleagues describe technical advances that will allow the proposed IsoDAR (isotope decay at rest) cyclotron — being developed for neutrino physics research — to produce many medical isotopes more efficiently than existing cyclotrons can.

In July, physicists met for the biannual European Physical Society High-Energy Physics conference and discussed exciting developments in their field.

The International Nuclear Physics Conference in Glasgow in July featured all areas of nuclear physics, an outreach programme and prizes for young scientists.

Understanding entanglement in many-body systems provided a description of complex quantum states in terms of tensor networks. This Review revisits the main tensor network structures, key ideas behind their numerical methods and their application in fields beyond condensed matter physics.

This Review tackles how soft condensed matter physics can assist in the understanding of complex food systems, by relying on the foundations of established theories on polymers, colloids and surfactants to unravel the properties of food macrocomponents and the challenges associated with this task.

Advances in semiconductor technologies have enabled the development of numerous designs of silicon tracking detectors in particle physics. This Technical Review outlines the current state-of-the-art technologies and discusses challenges, future directions and some of the recent applications outside particle physics.