Stefano Longhi

The 'hot freezes faster' rule is familiar to many from water freezing outside, but in the quantum world a similar trick helps a system settle down quicker. Imagine a chain where jumps in one direction are easier than in the other. The particle gets stuck at the edge, like a car in a traffic jam on a one-way street, and energy dissipation is slow.

Toss a handful of pebbles into a stream: some settle on the bottom, others get swept around. That's roughly how waves behave in a disordered medium — light in frosted glass, sound in porous material. Usually, disorder slows things down: the wave gets stuck, spreads out, loses direction. But in a new study, physicists built an acoustic lattice where things work differently.