International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

In 2025, we’ll celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the development of quantum mechanics with the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. This initiative will be presented at the United Nations in the next few months, with a formal proclamation anticipated in December 2023. The American Journal of Physics will join the celebration with a special issue to kick off the year in January 2025.

The IYQST not only marks 100 years since Erwin Schrödinger developed wave mechanics and Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan developed matrix mechanics. It also celebrates the contributions that quantum mechanics has made to our lives in the past century and will continue to make in the next one. The initiative’s website, Quantum2025.org, details how quantum mechanics contributes to health and wellbeing, reduced inequalities, industry and infrastructure, economic growth, climate action, and clean energy.

AJP’s special issue will celebrate all these aspects of quantum mechanics. We welcome papers that explain applications of quantum mechanics that can be presented in an undergraduate or graduate-level physics course. Papers on historical developments in quantum mechanics may be appropriate, if they will be interesting to instructors who don’t specialize in the history of physics. Of course, we welcome your ideas for how to effectively teach quantum mechanics, and we would be willing to consider those ideas even for teaching at the secondary-school level, since the effort to broaden the teaching of quantum mechanics will need to include contributions by those with experience teaching it at the university level. And as part of the kick-off to a year of celebrations, the issue can include papers supporting outreach efforts to the general public.

More information on AJP’s general policies and submissions procedures can be found at our website, ajp.aapt.org.

Guest Editors

Thomas A. Searles, University of Illinois Chicago

Joanna Behrman, Independent scholar

Daniel Schumayer, University of Otago and University of Sydney

Pierre-François Cohadon, Ecole Normale Supérieure

Gina Passante, California State University, Fullerton