But it’s still possible to make stable groups of entangled atoms that have some outliers among them that are unlike the main group, and the paper’s authors have shown that these outliers can be used to measure things about the main group without messing up their entanglement.
This includes really basic information like the density of atoms – how closely they are to one another – while they’re entangled, which historically has been out of physicists’ reach in individual experiments.
Before, physicists had to measure a whole bunch of the entangled atoms really quickly, and they’d have to accept that they were changing things around as soon as they measured that first atom. More measurements might check more atoms, but they’d be increasingly uncertain as time went on.
Now, all they have to do is measure what the outliers are doing and they can figure out how the atoms are distributed without the chaos. Within some limits, knowledge about the atoms’ density gets better – not worse – as more measurements are made.