Quantum materials are like finicky flowers: they only bloom in the cold. At room temperature, they hide their unusual properties, but when deeply cooled, they become superconductors or change their magnetic behavior. To understand how they work, you need to examine their atoms in the very cold where these properties reside.

A conventional electron microscope is not up to the task: the liquid helium used to cool the sample shakes and vibrates. Even tiny jolts blur the picture, like a shaky hand with a camera on a long exposure. The authors got around this problem by scanning the sample with rapid movements and then stitching the frames together, aligning each image by the positions of the atoms.

They also accounted for the fact that the microscope's lens itself distorts slightly in the cold, and they corrected these distortions mathematically. The result was clear images of the atomic lattice at minus 253 degrees Celsius. Now you can literally see how atoms arrange themselves into the state needed for quantum technologies.

This opens the door to unraveling the structure of materials that could one day form the basis of quantum computers and ultrasensitive sensors.