The foundation of particle diffraction experiments traces back to 1927, when George Paget Thomson revealed that electrons passing through a crystal grating produced diffraction patterns,...

The new result rests on a deceptively simple idea: if every particle has a wavelength, then a beam of positronium should spread and interfere just like light passing through a grating.

In a set of experiments reported in Nature Communications in late 2025, a Japanese team steered beams of these fragile atoms through nanometer‑scale slits and saw them diffract and interfere ...

So, in search of that threshold, scientists have devised experiments to find the “ fattest Schrödinger’s cat ” that can exist in classical macroscopic space.

To observe interference, you would need a diffraction grating of that same tiny scale, which is hard, if not impossible, to build.

The researchers sent the super-cooled particles through an interferometer that featured a series of diffraction gratings generated by ultraviolet lasers.

The light produces a perfect, repeated, evenly spaced image of the grating, though no lens is present.

This classical optics phenomenon is proof that when light passes through a diffraction grating, its own image repeats periodically as if it’s reborn.

Using their approach, the researchers were able to demonstrate the double-slit time-diffraction of magnon modes for the first time.

" An experiment from 2018 already showed that all-optical experiments could produce muons by accelerating an electron beam and colliding it with a thin solid target," said Dr. King.