Electric circuit ionization with laser. Image source: Mihail/Adobe
The process that the MIT researchers witnessed is called Pauli blocking. It’s built off the Pauli exclusion principle. This principle was first formulated by Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian physicist, in 1925. Pauli postulated that fermion particles like protons, electrons, and neutrons with the same quantum state could not exist in the same space.
That exclusion principle applies to the atoms in gas, too, which is what the scientists used to demonstrate it. Normally, atoms in a gas cloud have a large amount of space to move around in. When you send a proton, or a light particle, into the cloud, the atoms that bump into it interact with it. They absorb the momentum from the particle, which causes them to recoil at a different energy level. This then sends the photo scattering away.
To make invisible gas, scientists had to do the opposite. Instead, they cooled down the atoms. The atoms then lost energy, which caused them to form a type of matter called Fermi sea. The atoms were hemmed in by each other. This caused them to be unable to move up or down in energy level. At this point the particles are so packed together, when you send in particles of light, the atoms aren’t able to interact with it. The light is then Pauli blocked and passes through without issue.
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