A team at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark has created a hybrid quantum system, breaking through old limits in the “acoustic” range — the same frequency range as sound waves.

This means sensors can now pick up super-small signals in the acoustic range.

By pairing special entangled laser beams with a cloud of atoms acting like a “negative-mass” gadget, they were able to omit some of the random noise that usually blurs measurements.

The paper, published in Nature, says that breaking through the quantum noise may help scientists to build better gravitational-wave detectors that listen for tiny ripples in space-time caused by events like black hole collisions, ultimately changing how we listen to the universe.

The setup is simpler and smaller than previous systems, making it possible for development of applications in other high-precision tools.

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