AN ATOM’S electrons are an ever-shifting quantum melee, but it turns out you can still take their photograph as if they were standing still. A quantum-style microscope has imaged the hydrogen atom’s ...

What you’re looking at is the first direct observation of an atom’s electron orbital — an atom’s actual wave function! To capture the image, researchers utilized a new quantum microscope — an ...

Laguerre polynomials famously describe the radial part of the solution of the Schrödinger equation for hydrogen-like atoms. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger (right, with Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, ...

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 ...