A typical atom trap works like a funnel: laser light and a magnetic field slow atoms down and gather them at the center. But the funnel has a limit: it only catches atoms moving within a certain speed range. In the new experiment, the light was made 'wider': adding several nearby frequencies allowed the funnel to capture faster atoms.

The researchers used a laser with multiple frequencies instead of a single one, and without any extra tricks, they caught up to 10 billion atoms — twice as many as before. The filling rate increased fourfold: 130 billion atoms per second. It's like filling a pool with four hoses instead of one.

Numerical simulations showed that if the trap is made larger, the gain becomes even more pronounced. That means the method can be scaled up. Such dense clouds of cold atoms are needed for portable quantum sensors and experiments testing fundamental physics.