An illustration of positively charged holes interacting with negatively charged electrons between two sheets of graphene to form a bosonic pair. Credit: Cory R. Dean, Columbia University A tunable platform made from atomically thin materials may help researchers figure out how to create a robust quantum condensate that can flow without losing energya . Electrons flowing through power lines and computers inevitably encounter resistance; when they do, they lose some of their energy, which dissipates as heat. That’s why laptops get hot after being used for too long and why the server farms that power the cloud require so much air conditioning to keep the machines from overheating. Likewise, any particles carrying energy tend to lose that energy when they flow in a typical environment. There are a few exceptions, which usually occur at very low temperatures when particles form pairs called quantum condensates. This leads to superconductivity, with vanishing electrical resistance, in s...