By gently prodding a swirling cloud of supercooled lithium atoms with a pair of lasers, and observing the atoms’ response, researchers at Swinburne have developed a new way to probe the properties of quantum materials. Quantum materials—a family that includes superfluids, superconductors, exotic magnets, ultracold atoms and recently-discovered ‘topological insulators’—display on a large scale some of the remarkable…