Fortean Times

WEIRD PHYSICS

INVISIBILITY (SORT OF)

While it won’t be possible to use this discovery to make yourself vanish any time soon, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to demonstrate a quantum effect that can make matter invisible – but only a very specific kind under very specific conditions. Long known to be theoretically possible, the process, known as Pauli blocking, has never been experimentally created in the lab before. It relies on a fundamental feature of the quantum world, the Pauli exclusion principle – that within an atom two subatomic particles cannot coexist in the same energy level. Once one particle occupies a level, it excludes any others, meaning

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