Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics achieve direct imaging of quantum fluctuations at absolute zero temperature.
Fluctuations are fundamental to many physical phenomena in our everyday life, such as the phase transitions from a liquid into a gas or from a solid into a liquid. But even at absolute zero temperature, where all motion in the classical world is frozen out, special quantum mechanical fluctuations prevail that can drive the transition between two quantum phases. Now a team around Immanuel Bloch and Stefan Kuhr at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) has succeeded in directly observing such quantum fluctuations (Science, 14 October 2011).
Using a high resolution microscope, they were able to image quantum-correlated particle-hole pairs in a gas of ultracold atoms. This allowed the physicists to unravel a hidden order in the crystal and to characterize the different phases of the quantum gas. The work was performed together with scientists from the Theory Division at the MPQ and ETH Zurich. These measurements open new ways to characterize novel quantum phases of matter.
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