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I would like to know is there any physical limitations that prevent us from imaging a fundamental particle in someway? The Planck length gives us a limit to measurability wrt distance, is this the only limit?

For these purposes, let us consider an image any visual imprint of the particle such that the layman would call it an image of the particle in question.

hisairnessag3
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    BTW, the Planck length is far smaller than anything we can currently measure. At that scale, atoms and humans are roughly the same size. ;) However, the Planck length isn't really that important, please see https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/185939/123208 – PM 2Ring Jan 02 '21 at 14:02
  • You would need to be more specific about what you mean by "image". We can certainly measure the presence of particles, but if you want an "image" of a particle you'd have to state what you consider admissible. – Charlie Jan 02 '21 at 14:17
  • @Charlie clarified thanks – hisairnessag3 Jan 02 '21 at 14:39
  • What do you mean by "imprint"? – nasu Jan 02 '21 at 16:52
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    Elastic scattering of electrons off hadrons routinely help "reconstruct" an "image" of hadrons through their charge radius, but how much indirection a proverbial layman would tolerate is hardly possible to assay. – Cosmas Zachos Jan 02 '21 at 16:53

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In this link one can find a study of the hydrogen atom that can be considered an image of the the hydrogen atom, as the orbitals, predicted by the quantum mechanical equations are clearly seen.

From the abstract:

In this Letter, we report photoionization microscopy experiments where this nodal structure is directly observed.

orbhydr

A layman may call it an image , but it is a mathematically complicated accumulation of interactions: one hit by one photon on one electron, asingle interaction , in many time slots. This is in contrast to the usual images the layman sees, which are of many hits at one time t with a d(t) interval given by the biology of the eye.

Fundamental particles are quantum mechanical entities that have interactions according to quantum mechanical solutions of the system under study. Interactions are probabilistic due to QM. So we cannot image a fundamental particle in the usual sense of image. The researchers have managed to create a time sequence image that accumulated resembles the macroscopic images of the layman.

The physical limitation that does not allow to have a layman's image of a fundamental particle is quantum mechanics, which models very well the microcosm of atoms and fundamental particles.

Even the dots seen above , created by electrons on the detector are a footprint of an electron, not an image. The illumination comes from the disturbance of a material that the single electron ionizes as it goes through. The dots are the closest to a layman type image of an electron, as the time interval of passing through the material ,d(t) is small.

Edit, after looking up the Penning trap for another question

It seems that a successful experiment exists of capturing a single proton in a complicated system with Penning traps:

A dedicated Penning trap system was used to store a single isolated proton for spin-transition spectroscopy and simultaneous high-precision frequency measurements.

Italics mine.

Still, even if an image could be extracted using similar mathematics to the one used to get the proton magnetic moment, it would not be an image in layman terms.

anna v
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