A tiny needle glides over the surface like a finger over a page written in Braille. That's how a scanning tunneling microscope works: it feels the atomic landscape and turns bumps into a picture. But when you need to add a magnetic field, the design hits a wall. Usually, the field is directed perpendicular to the surface, like rain falling straight down. But what if you want to 'blow' from the side? Then you have to rebuild the microscope.

Engineers have assembled a new instrument the size of a walnut. It fits entirely inside a cylinder 37 mm in diameter — smaller than the width of a palm. Such a gap is almost always available inside a magnet. The microscope sits on a rotating platform, like a plate on the turntable in a microwave. Now the sample can be tilted at any angle to the magnetic field without removing it from the setup.

This flexibility opens the door to studying quantum materials. In these, electrons behave like a flock of birds: change the wind direction, and the whole flock turns. Previously, scientists could only see one angle of this flock. Now they can fly around it and view it from all sides.