Shohei Imai

An orchestra where every musician plays their own part, yet together they weave a complex melody: that's what a cloud of atoms looks like when their spins (intrinsic rotations, like tiny tops) oscillate in sync. Usually, these tops behave independently.

In the lab there is a laser that fires a pulse of light shorter than a billionth of a second. This pulse is no ordinary one: it is made of "squeezed vacuum," a quantum state in which the noise in one property of the light is suppressed while the noise in another is amplified.