Sure you learned about them in your high school Chemistry classes, but have you ever stopped to wonder what an atom really looks like?

No, generally most of us haven’t. But that average significantly changes when you’re speaking to the physics department at MIT, who have recently made it their mission to not only observe but photograph individual atoms roaming freely in space.

Thanks to their pioneered techniques, the team have captured the first ever images of several phenomena that, until now, have been purely theoretical.

And their findings, which have been recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters alongside those from other teams conducting similar research, will form the basis of a much deeper understanding of how these free-moving particles behave and interact.

To capture the images, the researchers developed a technique called “atom-resolved microscopy” which trapped a cloud of atoms between laser beams. Though trapped, the atoms were able to move freely around in the space, allowing the team to understand how they behave when uninterrupted. Then, a lattice of light freezes the atoms in place. In a third step, another laser lights up the atoms to show exactly where they were.

Though their technique was successful, it was not easy, as Professor Martin Zwierlein explained in a statement:

“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.”

Most excitingly, the team were able to record the behavior of atoms – each one-tenth of a nanometer in diameter – in different ways, committing evidence to things that had once only been theoretical.

In particular, the team were keen to observe bosons (atoms that form a wave) and fermions (atoms that pair up) in their interactions in free space.

Not only did Zwierlein’s team photograph these phenomenon, they were also able to evidence a boson cloud made up of sodium atoms forming a Bose-Einstein condensate and a ‘de Broglie wave’ – two once hypothetical states that form vital parts of quantum mechanics.

As physics continually develops, new techniques like this tell us a lot not only about individual atoms, but about how atoms all around us – from our office to outer space – are behaving every day, as Zwierlein continued:

“We are able to see single atoms in these interesting clouds of atoms and what they are doing in relation to each other, which is beautiful. We understand so much more about the world from this wave-like nature. But it’s really tough to observe these quantum, wave-like effects. However, in our new microscope, we can visualize this wave directly.”

And they’re not stopping there.

In their next experiments, the physicists aim to evidence some of the most remarkable yet vastly under researched phenomenon in the world of atoms, with an ultimate goal of understanding how these minutely tiny particles behave once and for all.

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