An ordinary sensor is like a scale that always shakes a little on its own. Even in total silence and at zero temperature, every particle jitters — this is quantum jitter, and it limits the precision of any measurement.

Scientists took a tiny glass speck (thinner than a human hair), suspended it in a laser beam, and made it jitter not in the usual way but in a special mode. They 'squeezed' that jitter: reduced it in one direction to better hear kicks in another. That way they caught a single impulse with a force of just 6.9 keV/c — like a fly hitting a spiderweb, but billions of times weaker.

This trick could make ultra-sensitive sensors even more sensitive. For example, they could pick up gravitational waves from distant black hole collisions or search for dark matter particles streaming through Earth.