Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest:
Here’s the page on the contest with other winners in a slideshow at the bottom.
That’s pretty damned cool.
How is that possible? I thought light microscopes could only see down to a resolution of about 5000 angstroms? Below that you need an electron microscope.
Also shouldn’t the diameter of the atom be about 1/20,000,000 the distance between the two electrodes? It looks way larger.
The laser is exciting it’s electron cloud, making its visible diameter much larger.
Very cool!
Is there a basic explanation for how we know it’s a single atom? That’s amazing.
Just to be a bit of a Debbie Downer, that photo’s a bit of a …cheat is not quite the right word, but it’s not really showing what you think it’s showing. It’s already known that the human eye can detect a single photon under the right conditions. So and any time that happens, you could say you were “seeing a single atom”. What we’re really seeing there is a halo of light surrounding something that’s still too small to be actually seen.
It’s a photo of an atom in the same way that this is a photo of the lightbulb in a lighthouse. Yes, that’s where all the light is ultimately coming from, but we’re not close enough to get sufficient detail that we could really say we’re seeing the thing itself.
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On the other hand - the fact that they can isolate a single strontium atom and make it sit still for enough time for the photo to be taken? Pretty damn impressive
All of this!
A more perfect analogy could not be written. This post deserves praise and gratitude.