In a new study, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used a cloud of atoms chilled down to incredibly cold temperatures to simultaneously measure acceleration in three dimensions—a feat that many scientists didn’t think was possible.

The device, a new type of atom “interferometer,” could one day help people navigate submarines, spacecraft, cars and other vehicles more precisely.

“Traditional atom interferometers can only measure acceleration in a single dimension, but we live within a three-dimensional world,” said Kendall Mehling, a co-author of the new study and a graduate student in the Department of Physics at CU Boulder. “To know where I’m going, and to know where I’ve been, I need to track my acceleration in all three dimensions.”

Scientists have demonstrated after decades of theorising how light interacts with vacuum, recreating a bizarre phenomenon predicted by quantum physics.

Oxford University physicists ran simulations to test how intense laser beams alter vacuum, a state once thought to be empty but predicted by quantum physics to be full of fleeting, temporary particle pairs.

Classical physics predicts that light beams pass through each other undisturbed. But quantum mechanics holds that even what we know as vacuum is always brimming with fleeting particles, which pop in and out of existence, causing light to be scattered.

How can the strange properties of quantum particles be exploited to perform extremely accurate measurements? This question is at the heart of the research field of quantum metrology. One example is the atomic clock, which uses the quantum properties of atoms to measure time much more accurately than would be possible with conventional clocks.

However, the fundamental laws of quantum physics always involve a certain degree of uncertainty. Some randomness or a certain amount of statistical noise has to be accepted. This results in fundamental limits to the accuracy that can be achieved. Until now, it seemed to be an immutable law that a clock twice as accurate requires at least twice as much energy.

Now a team of researchers from TU Wien, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Malta has demonstrated that special tricks can be used to increase accuracy exponentially. The crucial point is using two different time scales—similar to how a clock has a second hand and a minute hand.