Ana Maria Rey

On an ordinary optical table, amid lasers and mirrors, a cloud of a hundred strontium-87 atoms begins to live by the laws of curved spacetime. Half a second later, its quantum interference fades: gravitational time dilation destroys the superposition.

A hundred violinists in an orchestra all play from the same score. As long as the conductor keeps a steady tempo, the music sounds predictable. But once the players begin to hear one another, each adds their own tiny inaccuracies, and within a few bars the coordinated melody gives way to an improvisation no one could have foreseen.

An orchestra where every musician plays their own part, and the conductor tries to catch the overall melody. That's roughly how physicists view electrons in cuprates — ceramic materials that conduct electricity without resistance at temperatures above liquid nitrogen.

An orchestra without a conductor: each musician hears only their neighbor and is slightly late or early. In ordinary atomic clocks, the picture is similar — atoms oscillate, but their rhythm is disrupted by thermal jitter, limiting timekeeping accuracy. However, a group of physicists has managed to turn this flaw into a feature.

Any measuring device is spoiled by quantum noise — the chaotic jitters of elementary particles. To tame it, physicists used a trick on calcium fluoride molecules, much like squeezing a balloon: press in one spot, and it bulges in another.