Jiajun Chen

A massive refrigerator the size of a wardrobe hums, maintaining an interior colder than outer space. At its heart lies a silicon chip with tiny superconducting loops — qubits. But to make the chip work, dozens of thick copper cables snake from room temperature down to it.

Three invisible strings oscillate in the intergalactic void. This is not poetry, but a hypothesis about the nature of dark matter — an ultralight quantum field with spin 1, carrying three polarizations.