Experimental verification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for hot fullerene molecules
Quantum Physics
2009-11-07 v1
Abstract
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle for material objects is an essential corner stone of quantum mechanics and clearly visualizes the wave nature of matter. Here we report a demonstration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the most massive, complex and hottest single object so far, the fullerene molecule C70 at a temperature of 900 K. We find a good quantitative agreement with the theoretical expectation: dx * dp = h, where dx is the width of the restricting slit, dp is the momentum transfer required to deflect the fullerene to the first interference minimum and h is Planck's quantum of action.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0105061,
title = {Experimental verification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for hot fullerene molecules},
author = {Olaf Nairz and Markus Arndt and Anton Zeilinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0105061},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures