Reported by ScienceDaily
Quantum physics places fundamental limits on what scientists can know about the behavior of particles. Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle states that certain properties, such as a particle's position and momentum, cannot both be measured with unlimited precision. This restriction is not caused by flaws in scientific instruments. It is built into the laws of nature.
But position and time are different. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle does not impose the same restriction on these quantities. Now, researchers have experimentally demonstrated another fundamental limitation: an electron's location and its behavior over time cannot both be determined with arbitrary precision. Known as the "space-time limit," this newly observed relationship could have major implications for the future of quantum technology and ultrafast electronics.
The discovery comes from an international collaboration involving research groups at the Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy (RUN), led by Profs. Jascha Repp, Rupert Huber, Franz Giessibl, and Klaus Richter, along with a team at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg led by Angel Rubio.
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Understanding how matter behaves at the smallest scales is essential for developing the next generation of technology. Advances in clean energy, quantum computing, and powerful electronics for artificial intelligence all depend on knowing how chemical reactions unfold, how light interacts with materials, and how electrons travel through electronic devices.
However, even the sharpest microscopic photographs cannot reveal the full picture. Scientists also need to observe how these processes change over time, effectively creating slow-motion movies of events occurring at the atomic scale.
At RUN, researchers are developing ultrafast microscopes capable of recording the movements of electrons, atoms, and molecules with extraordinary precision in both space and time. About ten years ago, scientists in Regensburg used ultrafast scanning tunneling microscopy to resolve the movement of a single molecule across space and time for the first time.
Tracking individual electrons presents an even greater challenge. At these microscopic distances, electrons can move roughly a thousand times faster than atoms and molecules, with important changes taking place over just attoseconds.
To appreciate how extreme these scales are, consider that an atom is approximately ten million times smaller than a…