A team at the University of Göttingen has, for the first time, imaged the full three-dimensional wavefunction of an organic molecule – one of the most fundamental yet elusive concepts in quantum mechanics.
From synchrotron to lab bench
Until now, such complete 3D measurements required long sessions at massive synchrotron facilities. Instead, the Göttingen team paired a lab-based soft-X-ray light source with newly designed reconstruction algorithms – needing far less measurement data as a result.
Sharper than the atomic spacing
The researchers reconstructed the molecular orbital of a nanometer-sized organic molecule, resolving features smaller than the spacing between its carbon atoms. The work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Next step: quantum videos
Because it uses ultrashort femtosecond light pulses, the method opens the door to a kind of “stroboscopic videography” – to observe wavefunctions changing in real time, on the scale of quadrillionths of a second.
Sources: ScienceDaily, phys.org.
