Photo credit: MIT | Sampson Wilcox
MIT researchers have captured the first images of “free-range atoms,” a major breakthrough in physics. Why does it matter? They discovered how to take clear pictures of individual atoms roaming freely, or the super small building blocks of everything.
Normally, researchers lock atoms in super-strict environments, like cages made of laser beams, to keep them still. That’s because atoms are always buzzing around, making it hard to see what they’re really up to.
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“Free-range atoms” are ones not held in a super-tight trap. They can drift and mingle with each other more naturally. The MIT team figured out how to catch these atoms in action as they move and interact, something scientists hadn’t been able to do clearly before.
How did they pull it off? They used laser beams to create a sort of “cloud” where the atoms could drift and mingle. This trap wasn’t as tight as older ones, allowing the atoms to move more naturally. To snap a photo, they had to make the atoms pause for a second. That is where the “lattice of light” came in, which held the atoms still for just a moment.
Next, they shined a special laser on the atoms to make them glow, enabling the researchers to use an atomic resolution microscope to pinpoint each atom’s exact spot. Finally, the glowing atoms were captured in pictures, giving clear views of where they were and how they grouped.
The hardest part was to gather the light from the atoms without boiling them out of the optical lattice. You can imagine if you took a flamethrower to these atoms, they would not like that. So, we’ve learned some tricks through the years on how to do this. And it’s the first time we do it in-situ, where we can suddenly freeze the motion of the atoms when they’re strongly interacting, and see them, one after the other. That’s what makes this technique more powerful than what was done before,” said Martin Zwierlein, the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics at MIT.
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