Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers.

After first visiting the new exhibition by CJ Mahony and Georgie Grace at Smiths Row, I encouraged a good friend to go and have a look. Because it’s safe to say that Machines to Crystallize Time is ...

A weird phase of matter called a time crystal was once thought to be theoretically impossible. But in 2017, two teams reported seeing the first hints of these objects, which pulse in patterns that ...

But there was a loophole—and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of ...