Lei Wang

A gunner adjusts the eyepiece of a telescope: one more click, and the blurry blob becomes a crisp image. Climate scientists at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, made a similar adjustment to their model ICM.

Graphene is a carbon sheet just one atom thick, a fantastic conductor. But its surface is crinkly, like a wrinkled tablecloth that hasn't been ironed. Scientists built a 'sandwich': two of these sheets pressed together with a non-conductive spacer in between. They iron out each other's folds, like two halves of a sandwich making the surface perfectly even.

Usually, to generate terahertz waves (light between microwaves and infrared), researchers build a sandwich of different metals. One layer acts as the source, another as the receiver of charges. In such designs, platinum was assigned the role of a simple conductor. But it turns out it can work alone.

A stone falls into a well, and the splash reaches your ears with a delay. Something similar happens to light as it leaves Earth: its oscillations become less frequent, the beam seems to 'tire.' This is gravitational redshift — a phenomenon Einstein spoke of a century ago.

Electrons in a conductor are like a chaotic crowd: colliding, they lose energy, and resistance arises. In a superconductor, however, they move in unison, like partners in a well-coordinated dance, without touching each other. This state has reduced энтропией — meaning disorder. Such behavior is rare for gold and copper.

Tuning a quantum processor is monotonous work: you need to calibrate each qubit — a quantum cell — much like a watchmaker adjusting dozens of tiny gears. Humans get tired and make mistakes.

Imagine a skyscraper assembled not from individual bricks but from entire studio apartments. That's exactly how the Au₆Te₁₂Se₈ crystal is built: its nodes are not atoms but superatomic clusters of gold and chalcogens that behave as single quantum objects.

Picture a room where hundreds of people are talking at once while you strain to hear a pin drop. That is essentially how physicists with the PandaX-4T collaboration listened for silence inside 3.7 tonnes of liquid xenon.