Scientists Have Just Proved a Higher Level in Atoms for the First Time

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Here’s what you’ll learn by reading this story:

• In the first world, scientists have experimentally confirmed the capture of the speed of atoms, a task that was only achieved with photons.

• Scientists from Australia and the US pulled off this tricky measurement using ultracold helium atoms and a complex setup known as the Rarity-Tapster Interferometer.

• Because atoms have mass (unlike photons), this discovery opens the door to the study of gravity in the quantum realm.

The universe—at least as we know it—seems to be governed by two great principles. In the world of celestial mechanics, Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity explains the relationship between mass and energy, and in the subatomic realm, quantum mechanics runs the show. However, for nearly a century there has been a major problem with this universal invention—the two concepts do not mix.

One of the keys the sticking point is gravity-Einstein argues that it is an effect caused by the curvature of space-time, while quantum physicists speculate that the (currently theoretical) energy carrier known as the graviton mediates the gravitational interaction. For almost a hundred years, scientists have been trying to find evidence that might unite these two amazing ideas, but until now, a happy marriage is still impossible.

Now, a new study by scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, the University of Queensland, and the University of Oklahoma, for the first time, has confirmed experimentally that the speed of atoms can be captured. Although scientists have known about the absorption of atoms (and the absorption of photon energy) for decades, this first confirmation of atom entanglement is important to our understanding of this phenomenon – especially since atoms have mass, and therefore can provide a way for scientists to study quantum effects and gravity in the same experiment. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communication.

“They show non-local movement of external atoms, rather than internal degrees of freedom such as spin,” Yogesh Sridhar, lead author of the study and Ph.D. student at ANU, said in a press statement. “These results strengthen our confidence and understanding in quantum theory and pave the way for testing quantum mechanical theory on larger, real-world objects.”

For the experiment, Sridhar, lead researcher Sean Hodgman (also from ANU), and the rest of the team used three clouds of cold helium atoms suspended in a magnetic trap. Once the magnets were turned off, the atoms fell under the influence of the magnetic field and transmitted a series of laser grating pulses that created different paths in which the atoms could travel with equal probability. This setup is what is known as a Rarity-Tapster Interferometer (an optical instrument designed specifically for measuring non-local, or intercept) inside what is known as Bell’s inequality analysis framework (which tests the nature of non-local particles, as opposed to Einstein’s spatial validity).

“For two separate entangled atoms, if you change one of them, it will immediately affect the other,” Hodgman said in a press release. “It’s crazy to think that’s how the world works, but we’ve shown that it’s real.”

Indeed, it has long been thought that matter can be in many places at the same time—at least, somehow—and still interact over vast distances (Einstein once famously described this concept as “phenomenal action at a distance”). But scientists have been able to test that hypothesis in recent years thanks to the development of methods to control and measure individual atoms.

“Imagine that atoms move in different directions in space, they can have different effects of gravity. However, quantum mechanics says that atoms can take many directions at the same time,” Hodgman said in a press release. “So the fact that we can now show that these kinds of systems hold up means that we can think about looking at other dynamic effects that we can test as well.”

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