Resumen de Smile, hydrogen atom, you're on quantum camera
A quantum-style microscope has imaged the hydrogen atom's wave function, the equation that determines its electrons' positions and in turn the atom's properties. The electrons that dance around an atomic nucleus help determine how the atom bonds with others, but they are notoriously difficult to pin down. Aneta Stodolna of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and her team decided to make a picture using a technique dreamed up 30 years ago that can be thought of as a quantum microscope. Rather than taking an image of a single atom, they sampled a bunch of atoms. They made a beam of atomic hydrogen and zapped it with two separate lasers that excited the atoms electrons by precise amounts.
