Philip Kim

Conventional photolithography, used to make chips, hits a fundamental limit: light cannot draw features smaller than its wavelength. Here, they took a different route. First, they made sparse vertical ridges of oxide, then deposited layers of aluminum oxide, each one atom thick, onto them.

A compass needle trembles when an invisible current passes nearby. Physicists built a tiny compass from a single defect in diamond and brought it close to the edge of a superconductor to listen to the electric currents running there. These currents are unlike ordinary ones: they flow only along the boundary, like water along a riverbank, and do not scatter off obstacles.