The molecule that was also a wave

According to the principles of quantum mechanics, you’re a wave – just like light is both a particle and a wave. It’s just that your wavelength is so small that your wave nature doesn’t matter, and you’re treated like a particle. The larger an object is, the smaller its wavelength, and vice versa. We’re confused about whether light is a particle or a wave because photons, the particles of light, are so small and have a measurable wavelength as a result. Scientists know that electrons, protons, neutrons, even neutrinos have the properties of a wave.

But while the math of quantum mechanics says you’re a wave, how can we know for sure if we can’t measure it? There are two ways. One, we don’t have any evidence to the contrary. Two, scientists have been checking if larger and larger particles, as far as they can go, exhibit the properties of a wave – and at every step of the way, they’ve come up with positive results. Both together, we have no reason to believe that we’re not also waves.

Such tests reaffirm the need for quantum mechanics to understand the nature of reality because the rules of classical mechanics alone don’t explain wave-particle duality.

On September 23, scientists from Austria, China, Germany and Switzerland reported that they had measured the wavelength of a group of molecules called oligoporphyrins. Specifically, they used “oligo-tetraphenylporphyrins enriched by a library of up to 60 fluoroalkylsulphanyl chains”. Altogether, they consisted “of up to 2,000 atoms”, becoming the heaviest object directly known to exhibit wave-like properties.

According to the scientists’ peer-reviewed paper, the molecules had a wavelength of around 53 femtometers, about 100,000-times smaller than the molecules themselves.

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We have known since at least the 11th century, through the work of the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham, that light is a wave. In 1670, Isaac Newton propounded that light is made up of small particles, and spent three decades supplying evidence for his argument. His push birthed a conflict: was light wave-like or made up of particles?

The British polymath Thomas Young built on the 17th century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens to devise an experiment in 1801 that definitively proved light was a wave. It is known widely today as the Young’s double-slit experiment. It is so simple even as its outcomes are so immutable that it has become a mainstay of modern tests of quantum mechanics. Physicists use upgraded versions of the experiment to this day to study the nature and properties matter-waves.

(If you would like to know more, I highly recommend Anil Ananthaswamy’s biography of this experiment, Through Two Doors At Once; here’s an excerpt.)

In the experiment, light from a common source – such as a candle – is allowed to pass through two fine slits separated by a short distance. A sheet of paper sufficiently behind the slits then shows a strange pattern of alternating light and dark bands instead of just two patches of light. This is because light waves passing through the two slits interfere with each other, producing the famous interference pattern. Since only waves can interfere, the experiment shows that light has to be a wave.

The particulate nature of light would get its proper due only in 1900, when Max Planck stumbled upon a mathematical inconsistency that forced him to conclude light had to be made up of smaller packets of energy. It was the birth of quantum mechanics.

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The international group’s test went roughly as follows: the scientists pulsed a laser onto a glass plate coated with the oligoporphyrins to release a stream of the molecules; collected them into a beam using collimators; randomly chopped the beam into smaller bits; passed each bit through diffraction gratings to split it up; then had the two little beams interfere with each other. Finally, they counted the number of molecules striking the detector while the detector registered the interference pattern.

They had insulated the whole device, about 2m long, from extremely small disturbances, like vibrations, to prevent the results from being corrupted. In their paper, the scientists even write that the final interference pattern was blurred thanks to Earth’s rotation, and which they were able to “compensate for” using effects due to Earth’s gravity.

To ascertain that the pattern they were seeing on the detector was in fact due to interference, the scientists performed a variety of checks each of which established a relationship between the shapes on the detector with the properties of the components of the interferometer according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They were also able to rule out alternative, i.e. classical, explanations this way.

For example, the scientists fired a laser through the cloud of molecules post-interference. Each molecule split the laser light into two separate beams, which recombined to produce an interference pattern of their own. This way, scientists could elicit the molecules’ interference pattern by studying the laser’s interference pattern. As they varied the laser power, they found that the visibility distribution of the molecules more closely matched with quantum mechanical models than with classical models, confirming interference.

What these scientists have achieved isn’t only a feat of measurement. Their findings also help refine the border between the classical and the quantum. The force of gravity governs the laws of classical mechanics, which deals with macroscopic objects, while the electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces rule the microscopic world. Although macroscopic and microscopic objects occupy the same universe, physicists haven’t yet understood how classical and quantum mechanics can be combined into a single theory.

One of the problems standing in the way of this union is knowing where – and how – the macroscopic world ends and the microscopic world begins. So by observing quantum mechanical effects at the scale of thousands of atoms, scientists have quite literally pushed the boundaries of what we know about how the universe works.