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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."
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.
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!