The European Science Foundation has approved six new physics programmes to run for the next five years. The new programmes are intended to improve links between European researchers working in interdisciplinary fields and cover areas as diverse as complex polymers and quantum information. The other four programmes are: the interaction of super-intense, femtosecond laser fields with atoms, solids and plasmas; statistical physics of glassy and non-equilibrium systems; vortex matter in superconductors at extreme scales and conditions; and bridging the length and time-scale gap in molecular simulations.