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.
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.
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.