It may seem like technology advances year after year, as if by magic. But behind every incremental improvement and breakthrough revolution is a team of scientists and engineers hard at work.

UC Santa Barbara Professor Ben Mazin(link is external) is developing precision optical sensors for telescopes and observatories. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters(link is external), he and his team improved the spectra resolution of their superconducting sensor, a major step in their ultimate goal: analyzing the composition of exoplanets.

“We were able to roughly double the spectral resolving power of our detectors,” said first author Nicholas Zobrist(link is external), a doctoral student in the Mazin Lab.

“This is the largest energy resolution increase we’ve ever seen,” added Mazin. “It opens up a whole new pathway to science goals that we couldn’t achieve before.”