For decades, physicists have understood that disorder in a material tends to block the passage of waves — whether those waves are electrons moving through a semiconductor or photons traveling through a cloudy medium. The phenomenon, known as Anderson localization, has been a cornerstone of condensed matter physics since Philip Anderson first described it in 1958. Now, a team of researchers has demonstrated something that upends that intuition: under the right conditions, adding disorder to a system can actually increase the transmission of light through it. The result, published in Physical Review Letters , presents both theoretical analysis and experimental evidence for what the authors call “disorder-enhanced transport.” The work was carried out by a collaboration of physicists who designed a carefully structured photonic system — essentially a waveguide array — in which controlled randomness boosted, rather than suppressed, the flow of light.…