Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry, physics outreach, and education worldwide.

Overview

The magazine was launched in 1988, by IOP Publishing Ltd, under the founding editorship of Philip Campbell. The magazine is sent free to members of the Institute of Physics, who can access a digital edition of the magazine; selected articles can be read by anyone for free online. It was redesigned in September 2005 and has an audited circulation of just under 35000. The current editor is Matin Durrani. Others on the team are Michael Banks (news editor) and Tushna Commissariat and Sarah Teah (features editors). Hamish Johnston, Margaret Harris and Tami Freeman are online editors. Alongside the print and online magazine, Physics World produces films and two podcasts. The Physics World Stories podcast is hosted by Andrew Glester and is produced monthly. The Physics World Weekly podcast is hosted by James Dacey.

Breakthrough of the Year

The magazine makes two awards each year. These are the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year and the Physics World Book of the Year, which have both been awarded annually since 2009. 2009: "to August Jonathan Home and colleagues at NIST for unveiled the first small-scale device that could be described as a complete "quantum computer" 2010: "to ALPHA and the ASACUSA group at CERN for have created new ways of controlling antihydrogen" 2011: Aephraim M. Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for using the technique of "weak measurement" to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young's interference experiment. 2012: "to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider". 2013: "the IceCube Neutrino Observatory for making the first observations of high-energy cosmic neutrinos". 2014: "to the landing by the European Space Agency of the Philae (spacecraft) on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko", which was the first time a probe had been landed on a comet 2015: "for being the first to achieve the simultaneous quantum teleportation of two inherent properties of a fundamental particle – the photon". 2016: "to LIGO's gravitational wave discovery". 2017: "to First multimessenger observation of a neutron star merger". 2018: "Discovery that led to the development of “twistronics”, which is a new and very promising technique for adjusting the electronic properties of graphene by rotating adjacent layers of the material." 2019: "First direct observation of a black hole and its ‘shadow’ by the Event Horizon Telescope" 2020: "Silicon-based light with a direct band gap in microelectronics" 2021: "Quantum entanglement of two macroscopic objects" 2022: "Deflection of a near-Earth asteroid by DART satellite" 2023: "Brain–computer interface that allowed a paralysed man to walk"

Book of the Year

A blue ribbon appears against the winner. 2009: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo 2010: The Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology by Anil Ananthaswamy 2011: Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University 2012: How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2013: Physics in Mind: a Quantum View of the Brain by the biophysicist Werner Loewenstein 2014: Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape our Man-made World - Mark Miodownik 2015: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: a Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing and the Beginning of Everything - Amanda Gefter 2016: Why String Theory? - Joseph Conlon 2017: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story - Angela Saini 2018: Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different - Philip Ball 2019: The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mystery of Life - Paul Davies

Pictures of the Year

2015: