Cong-Feng Qiao

At Hungary's Institute for Nuclear Research, ATOMKI, physicists noticed something odd: in the decays of excited atomic nuclei, pairs of electrons and positrons sometimes fly apart at an unusual angle. It's as if an invisible mediator particle briefly appears and disappears between them.

A hundred years ago, James Clerk Maxwell invented a demon that sorts molecules and violates the second law of thermodynamics. Today its descendants work on quantum lattices: they don't move particles but shuffle errors, turning them into useful work.