Physicists Capture First-Ever Image of Atoms as Waves, Unlocking New Insights in Quantum Mechanics
TL;DR
For the first time, scientists have captured an image showing atoms behaving both as waves and particles, a phenomenon predicted by quantum mechanics. The team cooled lithium atoms near absolute zero and used an optical lattice to alternate between particle and wave-like states, demonstrating the wave-particle duality of matter. Their imaging method aligns perfectly with Schrödinger’s equation and opens new possibilities for studying more complex systems, such as those found in neutron stars or the quark-gluon plasma after the Big Bang.
For the first time, physicists have captured a detailed image of atoms acting as waves.
The image displays sharp red fluorescing atoms turning into blurry wave packets, beautifully illustrating the concept that atoms exist both as particles and waves — a key principle in quantum mechanics.
The scientists behind this imaging technique shared their findings on the preprint server arXiv.
“The wave nature of matter remains one of the most striking aspects of quantum mechanics,” the researchers explained in their paper. They also noted that their technique could be applied to more complex systems, potentially answering fundamental physics questions.
Wave-particle duality, first proposed by Louis de Broglie in 1924 and later developed by Erwin Schrödinger, holds that all quantum-sized objects — and thus all matter — simultaneously exist as both waves and particles.
Schrödinger’s equation is usually interpreted to mean that atoms exist as probabilistic wave packets in space, which collapse into particles when observed. Although this phenomenon defies our intuition, it has been observed in countless quantum experiments.
To capture this duality, physicists cooled lithium atoms to near absolute zero by using photons, or particles of light, from lasers to reduce their momentum. After cooling, they trapped the atoms in an optical lattice as distinct packets.
Once the atoms were confined, the researchers intermittently turned the optical lattice on and off, allowing the atoms to transition between near-particle states and wave-like forms.
A microscope camera captured the light from the atoms during their particle states at two different times, with wave-like behavior occurring between. By compiling multiple images, the scientists reconstructed the shape of the wave, which aligned perfectly 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,” explained study co-author Tarik Yefsah, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the École normale supérieure in Paris, to Live Science. “You can see our imaging method as a way to sample the wavefunction density, not unlike the pixels of a CCD camera.” A CCD camera is a widely used digital camera that captures images with a charge-coupled device.
The scientists say this is just a simple demonstration of their imaging method. Their next step is to use it to investigate systems of strongly interacting atoms, which remain poorly understood.
“Studying such systems could improve our understanding of strange states of matter, such as those found in the cores of extremely dense neutron stars or the quark-gluon plasma believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang,” Yefsah added.
