A mysterious quantum phenomenon reveals an image of an atom like never before. You can even see the difference between protons and neutrons.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator (RHIC), from the Brookhaven Laboratory in the United States, is a sophisticated device capable of accelerating gold ions to a speed of up to 99.995% that of light. Thanks to him, it has recently been possible to verify, for example, Einstein's famous equation E=mc2.
IMAGE:
BROOKHAVEN LABORATORY. Final view of a gold atom particles colliding in the
STAR detector of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. The beams travel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of
light before colliding.
Now, researchers in this laboratory have shown how it is possible to obtain precise details about the arrangement of protons and neutrons in gold using a type of quantum interference never seen before in an experiment . The technique is reminiscent of the positron emission tomography (PET) scan that doctors use to peer into the brain and other anatomical parts.
BEYOND WHAT WAS SEEN BEFORE
No
microscopic probe or X-ray machine is capable of peering into the innards of
the atom, so physicists can only theorize what happens there based on the
remains of high-speed collisions that take place in particle colliders , such
as CERN 's LHC .
However,
this new tool opens the possibility of making more precise inferences of
protons and neutrons (which make up atomic nuclei) thanks to the quantum
entanglement of particles produced when gold atoms rub against each other at
high speed.
The
researchers have shown how it is possible to obtain precise details
about the arrangement of protons and neutrons in gold using a type of quantum
interference never seen before in an experiment.
At this scale, nothing can be observed directly because the very light used to carry out the observation interferes with the same observation. However, given enough energy, light waves can actually stir up pairs of particles that make up protons and neutrons, such as quarks and antiquarks.
When
two nuclei intersect within a few nuclear radii, a photon from one nucleus can
interact through a virtual quark-antiquark pair with gluons from the other
nucleus (gluons are mediators of the strong interaction, the force that binds
nuclei). quarks inside protons and neutrons).
This allows for the equivalent of the first experimental observation of entanglement involving different particles, allowing images so precise that the difference between the place of neutrons and protons within the atomic nucleus can even begin to be appreciated.
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