That blue, pixelated image, ladies and gentlemen, is the very first image of an atom’s electron orbital structure. In other words, you’re looking at the first picture of an atom’s wave function. Here, ...

Extremely cold atoms have been nudged to self-magnify their quantum states so they can be imaged in unprecedented detail. This could help researchers better understand what quantum particles do in odd ...

If you shine a beam of light from a laser or flashlight, the beam will spread out over distance, becoming wider and less intense far from the source. That phenomenon is called diffraction, and it is ...

The heart of quantum mechanics is the wave-particle duality: matter and light possess both wave-like and particle-like attributes. Typically, the wave-like properties are inferred indirectly from the ...

The fuzzy quantum shape that describes the speed or location of a single particle, its wave function, has now been directly measured in the laboratory, giving this mathematical concept a small dose of ...

Imagine you are out on a walk. Outside the house in the fresh air you may have left the walls behind, but even so there are boundaries that limit where you can wander. In a city, you are constrained ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In the 1950s, Philip Anderson, a physicist at Bell Laboratories, discovered a strange phenomenon. In some situations where it seems as though waves ...

Physicists from the Canadian Institute for Measurement Standards are the first to measure a quantum mechanical wave function. And it only took 88 years from the formulation of Schroedinger’s equation!