PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — New research by physicists from Brown University puts the profound strangeness of quantum mechanics in a nutshell — or, more accurately, in a helium bubble.

At the smallest scales of nature, the rules of the world shift in ways that can feel unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Matter no longer behaves like solid objects moving along clear paths.

That blue, pixelated image, ladies and gentlemen, is the very first image of an atom’s electron orbital structure. In other words, you’re looking at the first picture of an atom’s wave function. Here, ...

Physicists from the Canadian Institute for Measurement Standards are the first to measure a quantum mechanical wave function. And it only took 88 years from the formulation of Schroedinger’s equation!

Researchers have succeeded in building a microscope that allows magnifying the wave function of excited electronic states of the hydrogen atom by a factor of more than 20,000, leading to a situation ...

In atomic theory and quantum mechanics, an atomic orbital is a mathematical function describing the location and wave-like behavior of an electron in an atom. This function can be used to calculate ...

Every once in a while we come across a physics story that seems very interesting – but we just don’t know what to make of it. The latest comes in the form of a press release from Brown University in ...

Electrons are elementary particles -- indivisible, unbreakable. But new research suggests the electron's quantum state -- the electron wave function -- can be separated into many parts. That has some ...