The tiny cone-shaped “skimmers” used in experiments looking for exotic chemical-quantum phenomena resemble the intake mechanisms of aircraft engines, and they perform similar functions: Each directs the flow of gas – the engine intake controls the supply of air for burning fuel, and the “skimmer” creates beams of cold flying atoms or molecules. While skimmers have been a necessary component in atomic and molecular-beam experiments for decades, they were also known to impose a fundamental limit on the number of particles one could pack into the beam. However, Prof. Edvardas Narevicius and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Chemical Physics Department have now revealed a simple way to overcome this limit.