{"id":247001,"date":"2026-11-10T06:45:51","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/upgraded-microscope-can-now-watch-individual-quantum-particles-in-motion"},"modified":"2026-11-10T06:45:51","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:45:51","slug":"upgraded-microscope-can-now-watch-individual-quantum-particles-in-motion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/upgraded-microscope-can-now-watch-individual-quantum-particles-in-motion","title":{"rendered":"Upgraded microscope can now watch individual quantum particles in motion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Energy can be carried in a number of ways: by electrons, the particles that underpin all modern electronics, as well as by quasiparticles, the results of different particles interacting with one another at the quantum level. Columbia chemist Milan Delor has been watching these different forms of energy flow with an instrument called stroboSCAT, a unique microscope that uses strobe-like light pulses to capture particles and quasiparticles as they move through different materials.<\/p>\n<p>The latest iteration of stroboSCAT, described in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41563-026-02800-6\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Nature Materials<\/i><\/a>, can now resolve individual quantum energy carriers as they move through materials for the first time. It can also observe their interactions with greater precision than existing imaging techniques.<\/p>\n<p>Electrons can easily be tracked using transport measurements that record electrical resistance. But such techniques cannot directly capture quasiparticles, like charge-neutral excitons or spin excitations. Delor first developed stroboSCAT as a postdoc working with Naomi Ginsberg at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2019. Over the years, he and his lab at Columbia have increased its temporal resolution to femtoseconds and its spatial resolution to just a few nanometers, and deployed it to detect electrons, excitons, phonons, magnons, ferrons, photons, polaritons and polarons in a variety of semiconductors and metals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Energy can be carried in a number of ways: by electrons, the particles that underpin all modern electronics, as well as by quasiparticles, the results of different particles interacting with one another at the quantum level. Columbia chemist Milan Delor has been watching these different forms of energy flow with an instrument called stroboSCAT, a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}