This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Efficiently controlling heat generation has become a major challenge as the semiconductors used in smartphones, computers and similar devices have become higher-performing and more miniaturized. The way heat is transmitted is determined by the vibration of the atoms that constitute a material, but it is not easy to directly examine, at the atomic scale, how neighboring atoms vibrate in coordination with one another.
A research group made up of Director and Professor Naoya Shibata, JSPS Research Fellow Koudai Tabata, Associate Professor Taketo Seki and Project Associate Professor Ryo Ishikawa, all of the Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, has succeeded in an atomic-scale double-slit experiment that treats neighboring atoms as "two slits" and demonstrates that it is possible to read out the vibration of atoms from the fringe pattern formed by electrons. Their paper is published in the journal Nature. The double-slit experiment makes use of a phenomenon in which waves passing through two narrow slits overlap and create a pattern of bright and dark fringes.
Since the British physicist Thomas Young first performed it using light in the early 19th century, it (Young's experiment) has been known as a fundamental experiment demonstrating the wave nature of light. If this experiment could be reduced to the atomic scale inside a material, it would allow direct investigation of the arrangement and motion of atoms at the level of a single atomic bond, but an atomic-scale double-slit experiment of this kind has never been realized. The research group successfully observed atomic-scale double-slit interference with an electron beam by using a phenomenon in which, when an electron beam narrowly focused by a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is incident between two neighboring silicon atomic columns separated by only 136 pm (picometer: 1 pm is one trillionth of a meter), the atom pair behaves like a double slit.
This scale corresponds to shrinking Young's experiment by roughly seven orders of magnitude (one ten-millionth). Furthermore, by closely examining how the fringe pattern appears, the researchers found that it is possible to read out the degree to which neighboring atoms vibrate in the same direction. This represents a new method for investigating the strength of bonding between atoms and how heat is conducted within a material.
This technique is a new measurement method for gaining information about phonons (lattice vibrations), which affect the rigidity of atomic bonds and how heat is conducted, by focusing on individual atomic bonds one at a time. Going forward, applying this method to research and development of semiconductor materials may make it possible to investigate, at the atomic level, regions where heat tends to accumulate or where it does not flow easily. In the future, this is expected to contribute to heat-dissipation design in semiconductor devices and to the development of materials that use heat efficiently.
Koudai Tabata et al, Atomic-scale double-slit interferometry with a focused electron probe, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10914-9 Provided by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
