Just read the article on ABC Science News about photographing a single atom. Not so convinced that an DSLR and macro lens could achieve this feat.
Obviously the camera is only capturing reflected light, what he may have captured is the apparently larger reflected glow of the laser light from the atom, not the atom itself.
Just read the article on ABC Science News about photographing a single atom. Not so convinced that an DSLR and macro lens could achieve this feat.
Obviously the camera is only capturing reflected light, what he may have captured is the apparently larger reflected glow of the laser light from the atom, not the atom itself.
It's an American atom - grossly overweight, fed on a steady diet of Coca-Cola and Lays, topped with an unhealthy dose of pumpkin pie with whipped cream.
If that's an atom, I am Einstein reincarnated as a Go-Go Dancer.
The ionic radius of Sr is 132 to 140pm or 0.14nm or 0.00000000014mm radius and 0.00000000028mm diameter (have I got those zeros right?). Clearly the camera cannot resolve such a small object. What I understand to be happening is that the laser is pushing an electron to a higher energy level and the camera is recording the photons emitted as the electron falls back to its ground state. The photon itself probably has a wavelength of ca 400nm (ie the photon is larger than the object emitting it) but of course the camera cannot resolve such a small disc. I suspect the size of the dot is due to scattering (and possibly diffraction?) within the optics.
That atom is huge lol yes the image scale is way wrong. That is picking up a glow of light that might indicate where the atom is but the atom it self would be thousands of times smaller than that.
Actually, is it even possible to take a photo of an atom that isn't moving? I thought to slow an atom down to zero movement needed absolute zero temperature and vaguely recall something about not being able to get any data from something that's at absolute zero, so no photo is capable.
I could be entirely wrong, this was over a scotch session with a physicist back in uni days...
"In microscopy, there is a rule of thumb that the smallest things you can distinguish with a perfectly engineered microscope have to have a size about half the wavelength of the light you're shining at it. The more exact version of this is known as the Abbé difraction limit. Visible light has wavelength of about 400-700 nanometres. This is of course about 4000-7000 times as much as the diameter of the atom, so there is indeed no way we can see an atom with a (diffraction) microscope using light."
"The Strontium atom appears larger than its true size because it was emitting light, and was oscillating slightly, over the course of the long exposure."
He was shining a blue laser on it so that is the light glow you are seeing not the atom itself.
And you have to remember that that dot you can see is just the electron cloud surrounding the nucleus (the solid part) which is a thousand times smaller again, far too small to be seen with technology available today.
