As the wave manifested itself, the particle hid behind it and traversed the prison walls.
The microscopic world challenges our common sense: quantum particles can traverse walls! In fact, probability waves still wiggle on the other side of the wall, leaving some chance for the particles to escape. Scientists used this effect to build microscopes that reach the smallest scale we can imagine: the scale of an atom. Will we ever be able to zoom in further?
Learn about potential barriers, wave functions and much more!
Visualizing atoms with the Scanning Tunneling Microscope.