{"id":90791,"date":"2019-05-16T14:02:56","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T21:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/researchers-shed-new-light-on-atomic-wave-function"},"modified":"2019-05-16T14:02:56","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T21:02:56","slug":"researchers-shed-new-light-on-atomic-wave-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/researchers-shed-new-light-on-atomic-wave-function","title":{"rendered":"Researchers shed new light on atomic \u2018wave function\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-shed-new-light-on-atomic-wave-function2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Physicists have demonstrated a new way to obtain the essential details that describe an isolated quantum system, such as a gas of atoms, through direct observation. The new method gives information about the likelihood of finding atoms at specific locations in the system with unprecedented spatial resolution. With this technique, scientists can obtain details on a scale of tens of nanometers\u2014smaller than the width of a virus.<\/p>\n<p>Experiments performed at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a research partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, use an optical lattice\u2014a web of laser light that suspends thousands of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/individual+atoms\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">individual atoms<\/a>\u2014to determine the probability that an atom might be at any given location. Because each individual atom in the lattice behaves like all the others, a measurement on the entire group of atoms reveals the likelihood of an individual atom to be in a particular point in space.<\/p>\n<p>Published in the journal <i>Physical Review X<\/i>, the JQI technique (and a similar technique published simultaneously by a group at the University of Chicago) can yield the likelihood of the atoms\u2019 locations at well below the wavelength of the light used to illuminate the atoms\u201450 times better than the limit of what optical microscopy can normally resolve.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2019-05-atomic-function.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\">Read more<\/div>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists have demonstrated a new way to obtain the essential details that describe an isolated quantum system, such as a gas of atoms, through direct observation. The new method gives information about the likelihood of finding atoms at specific locations in the system with unprecedented spatial resolution. With this technique, scientists can obtain details on [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1617,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-quantum-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90791","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}