Superconductors are materials that transmit current without loss. In the 1950s, John Bardeen and his colleagues explained that electrons in them pair up, like dance partners. However, Wolfgang Pauli showed that a strong enough magnetic field, like a whirlwind, would tear the pair apart — this is the Pauli limit. But in layered PdTe₂, it's different. When rolled into a film just 19 nanometers thick, the electron pairs find themselves in a cramped room: there's no room to move, the bond strengthens, and you need a hurricane to pull them apart. In the experiment, such a film withstood a field 10 times stronger than a thicker one.

This discovery draws a thread from nanometer-thin films to galactic beacons, touching on the laws of the Standard Model and the concept of entropy in quantum systems.