Jörg Wrachtrup

A crowd of thirty-one quantum sensors whispers within a diamond slab. Previously, this whisper was drowned out by the roar of floodlights: the random photon bursts used to read out the spin states masked the ensemble's own quantum noise. Now physicists have learned to switch off the floodlights and listen to the crowd itself.

A regular motor burns fuel and wastes a ton of energy as heat — that's dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. A quantum engine does it differently: its fuel isn’t heat, but a perfect rhythm. Physicists call this rhythmic precision quantum coherence.

A quantum computer is like an orchestra where electrons and nuclei play different instruments. Usually, the conductor needs two batons: microwaves for electrons and radio waves for nuclei.

Imagine an orchestra where every musician is a tiny magnetic sensor inside a diamond. To play cleanly, they need silence: no extra vibrations, no background noise. But when creating such orchestras, thin diamond films with nitrogen defects, dissonance bursts into the material. An international team of physicists studied how this disorder arises.