An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Niels Kjærgaard from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, has used steerable ‘optical tweezers’ to split ultracold clouds of potassium-40 (40K) atoms and smash them together to directly observe a key principle of quantum mechanics – the Pauli exclusion principle. The Pauli exclusion principle predicts a forbidden zone along a meridian of the spherical halo of scattered particles, which...
