Breaking the Sound Barrier at Absolute Zero Could Unlock a New Kind of Laser
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Chill a sliver of crystal to within a whisker of absolute zero and something strange happens to the electrons inside. They stop rattling around randomly, shed most of their thermal energy, and start behaving less like billiard balls and more like waves on a pond. Push an electrical current through that crystal hard enough, and those wave-like electrons do something stranger still: they break the speed of sound. Not the speed of sound in air, which is a sedate 340 metres per second, but the speed
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