Lin Li

In the world of atoms, any external influence can turn a neat order into chaos. Usually, energy losses only increase entropy — a measure of disorder. But physicists discovered the opposite: sometimes losses help the system maintain stability.

An ordinary flash drive stores bits in electron traps, but you can only read them through a separate wire and amplifier. In the new development, the same piece of the semimetal tellurium plays both the role of storage and the light bulb.

Reflecting off a nanowire, a radio wave, like a barcode scanner beam, instantly reads its state, offering hope for stable quantum processors.

A pendulum that almost nothing can knock off balance (not shaking, not heat, not magnetic fields) because it is hidden in the very heart of the atom. That is the kind of pendulum physicists used when they first switched on a nuclear clock. Previously, the best clocks, optical ones, relied on electron transitions.