Slashdot Mirror
Atoms Receive 'Movie Star' Treatment
Roland Piquepaille writes "A news release from the University of Toronto (U of T) says that a team of chemists has successfully captured images of atoms during the melting of aluminum. "Chemists at the University of Toronto have captured atom-scale images of the melting process-revealing the first images of the transition of a solid into a liquid at the timescale of femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second. The result is an unprecedented "movie" detailing the melting process as solid aluminum becomes a liquid." Can this be useful for you? Probably not. But these chemists think they have a new valuable tool which will allow them to make atomic movies of other chemical reactions. This summary contains more details and additional references."
Before these movies can be downloaded on Kazaa?
wouldent their cameras melt?
DUKEY!
This thread is worthess without pics.
Seriously, this is cool, but the whole thing is about photos that don't seem to be available anywhere yet except in the magazine.
So, where are these movies? Maybe a still-image sequence...?
Although I'm impressed that this team managed to do this, I'd kinda like to see it. A text-description of this process leaves me feeling all shades of empty inside. Gimmie gimmie gimmie.
-agent oranje.
Can I download this movie?
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
Will the aluminum atoms be cancelling their appearance on Letterman?
Hope they weren't underage... What is the age of consent for aluminum, anyway?
You just can't see them. They're tiny. The size of atoms.
The middle mind speaks!
itd be nice to see an image or two. a picture is worth a thousand words after all.
Interesting article, but where are the pictures? This is like announcing, "God captured on film! News at eleven!" then just having two anchors describe the footage.
where the comment ends and sig begins
You mean there are copies of atomic porn being spread across the Internet?
And without a .torrent, i won't watch any movie stars!
How fair is it when one of these flashy Hollywood metals gets their personal sheriffs van to pick them up from the private jet at the airport when if one of us lesser elements was accused of the same thing, we'd be reduced to nothing without a second thought. And they're crappy tippers and use underpaid central-american catalysts to do all of the actual work.
Okay, maybe what we need to do is pressure R. J. Dwayne Miller into releasing the movie to the public domain. After all, there are little school children around the world that would have thier entire perception of matter altered by this movie. Go slashdot minions! Find him, and guilt him into posting it here on slashdot. Mwahahaha!
The conclusion I draw from the experiment is not that melting occurs rapidly in general, but rather that there is no "in between" transition state between solid and liquid. Now that's cool. It would be neat if they could extend this experiment to substances that have two different liquid forms, like sulfur and see whether there is an intermediate state between them. SiO2 glass might be particularly interesting. We could also investigate dimerizations and all manner of things
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
There's a reason for the quotation marks. The researchers did obtain a movie of sorts, in that they repeated their basic experiment to get different timepoints in the melting process. However the frames making up the movie are electron powder diffraction (EPD) images. What you get is basically a pattern of rings centered like a bullseye, and the spacings between the different rings can tell you information about the material like how the atoms are configured. Put in the time component from several images and you can get (in this instance) a "movie" of aluminum melting.
I tried to find a free EPD image, but the closest thing I found was xray powder diffraction, with fake color--what you get from a diffraction image is greyscale. Anyway, it's a similar experiment, except the material is bombarded with xrays instead of electrons.
What color were the atoms?
That is the coolest change in matter unless plasma can go directly to solid, can it?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Atom movies (at the movies)... Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I bet they chose aluminum to help them forget.
Major kudos guys.
Your efforts ARE appreciated!
They have picture and pretty graphs here! Happy now?3 02/564 9/1382
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/
120 chars of filth!
Well.. the info is misleading.. you don't get pictures doing this stuff.
You can't even really talk about 'images' at the atomic scale anyway, since the stuff is so small compared to the wavelength of light.
(Kind of like asking the 'color of an atom'..)
What you -do- get is basically a graph of energy vs. time, at such resolution that it's faster than 'real-time' in the timescale of these processes.
Hence the 'movie' analogy. But it's just an analogy. There's no actual moving 'footage' of the stuff.