K. J. Vetter

Inside a refrigerator that cools matter to near absolute zero beats a mechanical heart — the pulse tube. It pumps gas and extracts heat, but along with the cold it brings tremors. Each beat of this heart shakes the instruments sitting next to the sample and ruins delicate measurements.

In a noisy city, you try to hear a cricket. It's quiet, and cars are humming all around. To catch its chirp, you set up a sensitive microphone and hit the noise-cancellation button. That's roughly how physicists hunt for axions — hypothetical particles that could be the very dark matter holding galaxies together.