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2w ago

MIT Physicists Capture First Direct Images of Freely Interacting Atoms

Using a novel atom-resolved microscopy technique, researchers visualized quantum phenomena like boson bunching and fermion pairing in real space for the first time.

Using single-atom-resolved microscopy, ultracold quantum gases composed of two types of atoms reveal distinctly different spatial correlations — the bosons on the left exhibit bunching, while the fermions on the right display anti-bunching.
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Overview

  • MIT researchers developed atom-resolved microscopy, freezing and imaging individual atoms to reveal their interactions in free space.
  • The team directly observed boson bunching and fermion pairing, confirming long-predicted quantum behaviors through real-space imaging.
  • The findings, published in *Physical Review Letters*, represent a breakthrough in visualizing quantum correlations at the atomic level.
  • Parallel studies by MIT’s Wolfgang Ketterle and a team from École Normale Supérieure corroborate the imaging techniques in the same journal issue.
  • Future applications of this technique include exploring complex quantum phenomena such as quantum Hall states and superconductivity mechanisms.