Chuanyu Zhang

Three thousand meters above sea level, a sheer cliff face. A classical climber picks a single route and crawls up step by step, often getting stuck in a local minimum: a small niche with no upward path. A quantum climber acts differently: it can leap across a canyon and land in a neighboring energy basin where the route is better.

Uranus and Neptune have long puzzled scientists: their magnetic fields are heavily tilted and tangled, nothing like Earth's. The answer lay in an exotic form of water — superionic ice, which fills their interiors.

Just as Water changes phase, freezing into ice or evaporating into vapor, forsterite, a key mineral of Earth's mantle, under pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres, reassembles its crystal lattice.