Artificial intelligence (AI) is a potentially disruptive tool for physics and science in general. One crucial question is how this technology can contribute at a conceptual level to help acquire new scientific understanding or inspire new surprising ideas. I will talk about how AI can be used as an artificial muse in physics [1], which can design new physics experiments [2,3,4] or suggest suggests surprising and unconventional ideas and techniques for human scientist [5]. In the end, i will talk about AI-Mandel [6], a closed-loop discovery system that automatically generates new ideas in quantum physics and can execute and verify them with intelligent domain tools, with ideas being at the level of publishable works in quantum physics.
[1] Krenn, Pollice, Guo, Aldeghi, Cervera-Lierta, Friederich, Gomes, Häse, Jinich, Nigam, Yao, Aspuru-Guzik, On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence. Nature Reviews Physics 4, 761–769 (2022).
[2] Ruiz-Gonzalez, Arlt, et al., Digital Discovery of 100 diverse Quantum Experiments with PyTheus, Quantum 7, 1204 (2023).
[3] Krenn, Drori, Adhikari, Digital Discovery of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors, PRX 15, 021012 (2025)
[4] Klimesch, Arlt, Ruiz-Gonzalez, Rodríguez, Gu, Haslinger, Vischia, Haack, Drori, Adhikari, Arndt, Kagan, Heinrich, Krenn, Designing Physics Experiments with Artificial Intelligence, Nature 657, 47–58 (2026)
[5] Gu, Krenn, Interesting Scientific Idea Generation Using Knowledge Graphs and LLMs: Evaluations with 100 Research Group Leaders. arXiv:2405.17044 (2024)
[6] Arlt, Gu, Krenn, Towards autonomous quantum physics research using LLM agents with access to intelligent tools. arXiv:2511.11752 (2025).