Description
An annual survey of the physics.app-ph arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 120 papers and organised into 44 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.
Book framework (share of the year's output):
- Photonic and Optoelectronic Device Applications (89.9%) — Focuses on the design, simulation, and experimental realization of photonic structures, sensors, and detectors, including nonlinear optics and laser-based systems.
- Energy Harvesting and Thermal Management Technologies (3.7%) — Addresses challenges in energy efficiency, thermal transport, and power systems, including wireless power transfer, thermoelectrics, and battery materials.
- Spintronics and Magnetic Material Phenomena (1.7%) — Investigates magnetic phase transitions, spin transport, and magnetic actuation in various materials, with an emphasis on altermagnets and spintronic devices.
- Acoustic and Wave Propagation Sensing Systems (1.4%) — Explores acoustic wave manipulation, scattering effects, and sensor applications, including surface acoustic wave devices and acoustic cloning.
- Quantum Information and Photonic Platforms (1.1%) — Develops quantum technologies such as single-photon detection, quantum key distribution, and quantum transduction for information processing and communication.
- Metamaterials and Advanced Mechanical Properties (1.0%) — Studies the mechanical and physical properties of metamaterials and 2D materials, focusing on reconfigurable structures and multiscale mechanical responses.
- Electronic Device Design and Optimization (0.6%) — Optimizes electronic and photonic device designs using computational tools, addressing performance limitations in superconductors, transistors, and metasurfaces.
- Metasurface Antennas and Electromagnetic Arrays (0.4%) — Designs reconfigurable metasurfaces and antenna arrays for 5G/6G communications, focusing on beamforming, scattering reduction, and tunable filters.
- Hybrid Quantum and Magnonic Coupling Systems (0.2%) — Examines strong coupling and hybrid interactions between magnons, photons, and phonons in quantum and acoustic systems.
- Scalable Optical and Sensing Architectures (0.1%) — Develops scalable optical neural architectures for video detection and high-sensitivity gas permeation systems.
Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.