A laser fires an extremely short pulse of light: it lasts less than one millionth of a second. This light is not ordinary. It is called "squeezed vacuum" because the noise in one part of the light wave is reduced while in another it is increased. When such light passes through matter, it usually leaves the matter in a mixed, undefined state. But if you then measure one property of the light, such as its electric field, the matter suddenly ends up in a well-defined quantum state.
For matter made of many identical particles, such a measurement selects a state in which all particles are polarized the same way. This state is highly sensitive to external influences, so it can be used in sensors that measure magnetic fields or gravity with great precision. Importantly, everything happens very fast, faster than the matter can lose its quantum properties.
Bright squeezed vacuum can contain up to $10^{13}$ photons in a single mode, comparable to the number of stars in a small galaxy. Yet its quantum nature manifests in a superposition of coherent states, not merely in noise.
The idea of a macroscopic quantum superposition echoes Schrödinger's cat, and the creation of cat-like states of matter brings to mind stories about quantum computers, where such states are used for computation.