TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half-angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom also known as really freaking small — has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read more...
Where these two gold crystals meet they are joined by a complex arrangement of atoms, forming a nanobridge that accommodates their different orientations. The atoms are 2.3 angstroms apart. TEAM 0.5's unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio makes it possible to distinguish individual atoms and, at the edges of the two crystals, deduce their position in three dimensions.
Where these two gold crystals meet they are joined by a complex arrangement of atoms, forming a nanobridge that accommodates their different orientations. The atoms are 2.3 angstroms apart. TEAM 0.5's unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio makes it possible to distinguish individual atoms and, at the edges of the two crystals, deduce their position in three dimensions.
What you see is of course how the individual atoms are arranged. The black dots aren't balls of mass; the nucleus is way smaller. This (more or less) shows the electric field and not actual mass. If it would show mass it would be a large empty picture, with a few small dots if you zoom in another 10000x (that is of course what quantum mechanics predicts).
ReplyDeleteAtomic scales have been reached before with electron microscopes, but this is by far the highest resolution picture I've ever seen of an atom structure.
What an amazing fabric of matter...
OMG this is very cool!
ReplyDeleteThey say you're able to see atoms WIGGLE!
Now if we had 2 of these microscopes maybe you could see it in 3D!