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Science

Painting Pictures With Atom Waves

James Glanz

Published Aug 9, 1996• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A Japanese team has come up with a striking demonstration of the wavelike nature of matter. Using optical principles to control the quantum-mechanical waves of neon atoms, the researchers coaxed the atoms to form a minute physical image. They passed the waves through a computer-generated hologram, an apparently meaningless pattern in a membrane that caused the atom waves to interfere and create an intelligible image—the letters NEC—on a detector.

DOI
10.1126/science.273.5276.737

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A Japanese team has come up with a striking demonstration of the wavelike nature of matter. Using optical principles to control the quantum-mechanical waves of neon atoms, the researchers coaxed the atoms to form a minute physical image. They passed the waves through a computer-generated hologram, an apparently meaningless pattern in a membrane that caused the atom waves to interfere and create an intelligible image—the letters NEC—on a detector.
A gray-scale photographic image of atoms has been generated by using a computer-designed thin-film hologram. An ultra-cold neon atomic beam in the 1s 3 state was transmitted through a thin-film binary hologram made of SiN4 and generated a pattern of atoms on a micro-channel plate detector. The design and the quality evaluation of the hologram for gray-scale pictures are discussed theoretically. The validity of the theoretical analysis has been tested by a hologram that generated a simple test pattern.
A cold metastable neon atomic beam was manipulated with a reflective amplitude hologram that was encoded on a silicon surface. A black-and-white pattern of atoms was reconstructed on a microchannel plate detector. The hologram used the enhanced quantum reflection developed by authors and was made of a two-dimensional array of rectangular low and high reflective cells. The surface of the high reflective cell was composed of regularly spaced roof-shaped ridges, while the low reflective cell was simply a flat surface. The hologram was the first demonstration of reflective atom-optical elements that used universal interaction between a neutral atom and solid surface.
One of the most counterintuitive consequences of quantum mechanics is that particles can behave like waves. This wavelike nature is seen not only for elementary particles, such as electrons as they orbit the nucleus, but also for free particle beams, as shown by many experiments in electron, neutron and atom optics. Interference effects provide unambiguous proof of wave-like behaviour and in the last five years such effects have been widely used for beams of neutral atomic particles. Researchers are now starting to exploit the wave nature of these beams further by using many tricks already established for optics.
We describe various techniques to manipulate laser-cooled Ne atoms interferometrically by using a silicon nitride film with holes and electrode deposition. Laser-cooled Ne atoms pass through a computer-generated through-hole binary hologram and generate an atomic image on a substrate. The hologram can be designed to provide a spherical phase correction, and the reconstructed pattern is focused on the substrate at a finite distance from the hologram. Such holographic manipulation can be extended to gray-scaled reconstruction that is used to deposit relief-like 3D atomic patterns on surfaces. In addition, an atom interacts with electric, magnetic, and optical fields. This provides the holographic atomic-wave manipulation to perform functions that are difficult for a light wave. The Stark shift induced by an external electric field is used to switch and to modify atomic patterns in real time. We also introduce an reflecting type atom holography by using quantum reflection.
How can we construct a picture of the photon from the wealth of observation material available to us? The photon appears to have a split personality: it is neither a wave nor a particle but something else which, depending on the experimental situation, exhibits a wave- or a particle-like behavior. In other words, in the photon (as in material particles such as the electron) the particle–wave dualism becomes manifest. Whereas classically the wave and the particle pictures are separate, quantum mechanics accomplishes a formal synthesis through a unified mathematical treatment. Let us look first at the wave aspect familiar from classical electrodynamics, which seems to be the most natural description. It makes all the different interference phenomena understandable, such as the “interference of the photon with itself” on the one hand and the appearance of spatial and temporal intensity correlations in a thermal radiation field on the other (which are obviously brought about by superposition of elementary waves emitted independently from different atoms). It might come as a surprise (at least for those having quantum mechanical preconceptions) that the classical theory is valid down to arbitrarily small intensities: the visibility of the interference pattern does not deteriorate even for very small intensities – the zero point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field advocated by quantum mechanics do not have a disturbing effect – and is valid not only for conventional interference experiments but also for interference between independently generated light beams (in the form of laser light).
At the atomic scale, the distinction between particles and waves breaks down. The realization, early in the twentieth century, that light consists of discrete packages, or “photons,” prompted the converse suggestion that particles could behave like waves. Confirmation of this idea came in 1927, from an experiment involving the scattering of electrons from a crystal. Today, “wave-particle duality” is central to quantum mechanics, and the wave properties of subatomic particles are widely used in microscopy and crystallography. Electron diffraction techniques are widely used to characterize atomic arrangements on solid surfaces and inside thin films, and to investigate the structures of molecules in gases. The dual nature of waves and particles is part of the “spookiness” of quantum mechanics, which cannot be explained in any classical way. It used to be that one could only imagine an experiment that would simultaneously demonstrate the particle and wave nature of electrons.