Over 14000 scientists came together for the APS Global Physics summit held in Denver, Colorado, USA from 15th-19th March 2026 (https://summit.aps.org/).
The scientific technical sessions were preceded by plenary lectures from the three 2025 Physics Nobel laureates for their work on macroscopic quantum phenomena, John Martinis, Michel Devoret and John Clarke.
Hundreds of industrial companies held stands, including a strong presence of quantum technologies
The Division of Materials Physics (DMP) prizes awarded to both Thomas Mikolajick (NaMLAb) and Ferro4EdgeAI, who gave a lecture on Ferroelectric Materials for Electron Devices and to Sayeef Salahuddin (University California Berkeley) who presented groundbreaking results on Ferroelectricity in ultrathin binary oxides, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec9417 .
Most of the ferroelectric related work was presented in the DMP sessions, some highlights included Jan Musfeldt’s (Univ Tennessee) on Hafnia under pressure (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2312571121), superlattice coercive fields presented by Shi Liu from Westlake University (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61758-2) and lower limit coercive fields https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.15.021042 suggesting a combination of the two main switching mechanisms, Kolmogorov-Avrami-Ishibashi (KAI) & Nucleation limited (NLS).
Yu Liu, also from Univ Tennessee, and in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory presented scanning probe analysis of combinatorial libraries of wurtzite ferroelectrics AlScBN (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.18067 ) while Kai Huang from Nebraska, showed the possibility of multi state ferroelectric switching in wurtzites.
Vevek Dey (IIS Bengaluru, India) showed some fascinating results on how harnessing noise could allow sub-coercive field switching. Finally, several presenters showcased results on 2D sliding ferroelectrics.
Nick Barrett from the Ferro4EdgeAI consortium presented his labs results on the correct quantification of oxygen vacancies using XPS and HAXPES (https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0288354 )
