Transporter Comb

The world's fastest oscillating nanomachine straddles the line between the worlds of classical and quantum physics. It's about a tenth as wide as a human hair, composed of 50 billion atoms, and vibrates a billion and a half times a second. Because the nanomachine is relatively large, the Boston University physics grad students who built it can attach electrical wiring to it, allowing them to detect motion on the molecular level. It's by far the largest object to exhibit quantum motion.

At a certain frequency, the paddles begin to vibrate in concert, causing the central beam to move at that same high frequency, but at an increased and easily measured amplitude. Where each paddle moves only about a femtometer, roughly the diameter of an atom's nucleus, the antenna moves over a distance of one-tenth of a picometer, a tiny distance that still translates to a 100-fold increase in amplitude. [...]

The group carries out the experiments under extremely cold conditions, at a temperature of 110 millikelvin, which is only a tenth of a degree above the absolute zero. When cooled to such a low temperature, the nanomechanical oscillator starts to jump between two discrete positions without occupying the physical space in between, a telltale sign of quantum behavior.

I'm amazed that we can even observe and measure things on that scale.