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Atomic physics

The social life of atoms

Nature volume 445, pages 373–375 (2007)Cite this article

In a trail-blazing experiment 50 years ago, it was observed that photons from far-off stars bunch up. But in fact there's a more general distinction among free, non-interacting particles: bosons bunch, and fermions 'antibunch'.

Counting individual quantum-mechanical objects such as the particles of a complex many-body system — whether photons, electrons, atoms or something else — is an efficient way to learn about the properties of both the system and of the particles being counted. Fifty years ago, Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Twiss1 published the results of the paradigmatic experiment of this sort, in which they counted joint detections, in two separate detectors, of photons from distant stars. The two-photon correlations clearly showed that the photons liked to arrive bunched up in groups. Jeltes et al., whose results appear on page 402 of this issue2, use less well-travelled particles for their investigations — ultracold helium atoms. But they are able, for the first time in the same experiment, to compare and contrast the Hanbury Brown–Twiss (HBT) effect for both 'bosonic' and 'fermionic' particles.

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Figure 1: Bunch, antibunch.
Figure 2: Noise assessment.

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  1. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats and the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, Castelldefels (Barcelona), 08869, Spain

    Maciej Lewenstein

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  1. Maciej Lewenstein
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Lewenstein, M. The social life of atoms. Nature 445, 373–375 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/445372a

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