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To quickly dissolve sugar, you don't need to stir carefully — just shake the glass. A similar principle works in quantum systems: noise, usually considered a disturbance, speeds up the transition to a thermal state. This is a state of complete chaos, where everything is mixed to the limit from the point of view of entropy — a measure of disorder.

Previously, noise was thought to interfere. But it turns out that without it, some systems cannot reach equilibrium at all.

Properly dosed noise works like a shake — helping the system shuffle everything faster.

This discovery is important for practice. Thermal states are needed for calculations, for example, to model materials. They are easy to verify, which means that today we can extract benefit from imperfect quantum machines. Paradoxically, the noise that engineers try to eliminate has turned out to be the key to the first useful quantum computations.