- 4454
- ATOMS become waves?- For the first time ever, physicists have
captured a clear image of individual atoms behaving like a wave. The image shows sharp red dots of fluorescing
atoms transforming into fuzzy blobs of wave packets and is a stunning
demonstration of the idea that atoms exist as both particles and waves. This concept is one of the cornerstones of
“quantum mechanics”.
-------------------------------------------- 4454 - ATOMS become waves?
- We've seen atoms transforming into “quantum
waves” just as Schrödinger predicted. A
new imaging technique, which captured frozen lithium atoms transforming into
quantum waves, could be used to probe some of the most poorly understood
aspects of the quantum world.
-
- The wave nature of matter remains one of the
most striking aspects of quantum mechanics. This new technique could be used to
image more complex systems, giving insights into some fundamental questions in
physics.
-
- First proposed by the French physicist Louis
de Broglie in 1924 and expanded upon by Erwin Schrödinger two years later,
“wave particle duality” states that all quantum-sized objects, and therefore
all matter, exists as both particles and waves at the same time.
-
- A tweak to Schrödinger's cat equation could
unite Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics. Schrödinger's famous equation is typically
interpreted by physicists as stating that atoms exist as packets of wave-like
probability in space, which are then collapsed into discrete particles upon
observation. While bafflingly counterintuitive, this bizarre property of the
quantum world has been witnessed in numerous experiments.
-
- To image this fuzzy duality, the physicists
first cooled lithium atoms to near-absolute zero temperatures by bombarding
them with photons, or light particles, from a laser to rob them of their
momentum. Once the atoms were cooled, more lasers trapped them within an
optical lattice as discrete packets.
-
- With the atoms cooled and confined, the
researchers periodically switched the optical lattice off and on expanding the
atoms from a confined near-particle state to one resembling a wave, and then
back.
-
- A microscope camera recorded light emitted
by atoms in the particle state at two different times, with atoms behaving like
waves in between. By putting together many images, the authors built up the
shape of this wave and observed how it expands with time, in perfect agreement
with Schrödinger's equation
-
- This imaging method consists in turning
back on the lattice to project each wave packet into a single well to turn them
into a particle again. It is not a
wave anymore. This imaging method as a
way to sample the wave function density, not unlike the pixels of a CCD
camera. A CCD camera is a common type of
digital camera that uses a charge-coupled device to capture its images.
-
- Studying such systems could improve our
understanding of strange states of matter, such as those found in the core of
extremely dense neutron stars, or the quark-gluon plasma that is believed to
have existed shortly after the Big Bang.
-
-
May 4, 2024 ATOMS become waves? 4454
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--------------------- --- Saturday, May 4, 2024
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