Physicists create first direct images of the square of the wave function of a hydrogen molecule
Lisa Zyga
Published in Nature Communications For the first time, physicists have developed a method to visually image the entanglement between electrons. As these correlations play a prominent role in determining a molecule’s wave function—which describes the molecule’s quantum state—the researchers then used the new method to produce the first images of the square of the two-electron wave function of a hydrogen (H 2 ) molecule. The wave function is not an observable in quantum physics, so it cannot be observed, Martín said. The researchers expect that the new approach can be used to image molecules with more than two electrons as well, by detecting the reaction fragments of multiple electrons. The method could also lead to the ability to image correlations between the wave functions of multiple molecules.