Collaboration makes possible what individual action cannot. French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is said to have put it this way: “One man may hit the mark, another blunder; but heed not these distinctions. Only from the alliance of the one, working with and through the other, are great things born.” Examples, from a win by the local football team to a global project like Wikipedia, are all around us. Does the principle still apply when the actors are quantum entities, not people? It seems it does. Atoms, being quantum objects, behave randomly when considered as individuals; yet in interacting groups they form wonderfully ordered things: crystals, DNA, and so forth.
Over the past several years, the technique of engineering interactions among quantum objects has emerged as a promising way to reduce quantum randomness in precision measurement. Of course, one way to increase the precision of a measurement is to increase...
