“It just gives it to you in a different way.” “This doesn’t provide any more information than other methods,” says Lundeen. Eliminating all photons that were moving in a specific direction - a strong measurement of momentum - allowed the scientists to map out the wave function using the still particles that remained. The team polarized photons so that the angle of each particle gave a rough idea of its location, leaving just enough uncertainty to not disturb the wave function. To demonstrate how this works in the laboratory, the team measured the wave function that describes the location of a single particle of light, or photon.

Lundeen and colleagues favor a direct interrogation using a combination of strong measurements, which provide the comfort of certainty but destroy the wave function, and weak measurements, which provide uncertain information but do little damage. “It’s like working out the shape of a water wave by moving a light around and measuring the wave’s shadow on the bottom of the pool,” says Jeff Lundeen, a physicist at Canada’s National Research Council Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa. To calculate a wave function, scientists usually collect lots of indirect measurements using a technique called quantum state tomography. The equation for the wave function is the starting point, for instance, for drawing the colorful shapes in chemistry textbooks that show the probability of an electron being in a certain spot. This interpretation dates to the 1920s, when physicist Max Born argued that the wave function, represented by the Greek letter psi, is a useful mathematical tool. “It’s not really thought to be something physical.” “Measuring the wave function itself is not really thought to be a possible thing,” says Stanford physicist Onur Hosten. But scientists in Canada have worked out a gentler way to touch it, they report June 9 in Nature.

Like a bubble on the breeze, the wave function usually disappears when poked or prodded for information. The fuzzy quantum shape that describes the speed or location of a single particle, its wave function, has now been directly measured in the laboratory, giving this mathematical concept a small dose of reality. Canadian team achieves quantum feat that makes the intangible a little more tangibleĬATCHING A WAVE The wave function that describes the location of a single particle of light is colorfully depicted in an artist’s interpretation, superimposed on an image of the experimental setup.

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