Rouven Maier

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.