If you shake a box of sand long enough, patterns appear on its surface — patterns that weren't there when the box was still. It's the same here: physicists took a cloud of cold atoms, trapped them in an optical lattice, and began shaking it periodically. This gave rise to a new state in the atoms, like a new pattern in the sand that doesn't exist without the shaking. Such states are called topological phases.
In the experiment, they used two 'motors' with different frequencies. The first made atoms hop between neighboring lattice sites, while the second controlled the sign of those hops, as if changing the direction in which a kaleidoscope rotates. The scientists adjusted the phase between the motors so that two 'gaps' in the energy spectrum (intervals where atoms are forbidden to exist) twisted in the same or opposite directions. When the twists added up, they got a phase with a large winding number; when they subtracted, the gaps remained but with different indices.
To see the result, they briefly 'illuminated' the atoms with a laser and watched how their internal state changed. This allowed them to measure the winding of each gap separately. It turned out that you can precisely tune how many times the energy band wraps around its axis, simply by changing the shift between the two frequencies.
It's like learning to conduct an orchestra where each musician plays at their own tempo, yet together they create harmony. Now physicists have a tuning knob to create and study exotic quantum states that don't exist at all in a static system.
Atoms in such a lattice behave like electrons in a crystal, but the lattice can be changed in milliseconds, just by turning a laser knob.