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Electron Strobe Makes Movies of Atoms

Posted by Soulskill on from the first-steps-toward-a-nanodisco dept.

holy_calamity writes "Some grainy black and white movies are receiving rave reviews from scientists. They are taken by a new microscope which, thanks to a 'strobing' electron gun, can image movement at sub-nanometer scales. Until now, only still images that smeared out movement were possible at such scales. The press release notes, 'The researchers first blasted the sample with a pulse of heat. The heated carbon atoms began to vibrate in a random, nonsynchronized fashion. Over time, however, the oscillations of the individual atoms became synchronized as different modes of the material locked in phase, emerging to become a heartbeat-like "drumming."' Further details and a few animations are available at Caltech's site."

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Very import research by moteyalpha · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is very exciting to see the possibility that some of the mechanisms of protein folding and DNA protein interaction might be discovered with this technology. It might be invaluable in determining how a prion causes its damage.The rate at which this technology is changing seems to beat Moore's law. I see that graphene for memory has hit 10nm now and may become 3D, which will make a very large factorial change to the scale of memory.

  2. Re:Heisenberg? by jamesh · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think the uncertainty principal is still safe. What they are doing is equivalent to what they've been able to do before, only fast enough to give an impression of motion.

    If you think about measurement at that scale as being equivalent to throwing tennis balls at a basketball and looking at where the tennis balls end up to calculate where the basketball must be, then even if you throw more tennis balls you are still affecting the basketball in an unpredictable way.

  3. Re:Heisenberg? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.

  4. It's rubbish by littleghoti · · Score: 4, Informative

    transmission electron spectroscopy does not have atomic resolution - the title is misleading. The best a TEM can manage is diffraction patterns from ordered regions.

  5. It actually applies to everything. by The+Creator · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's just that the bigger something is, the less significant the uncertainty is.

    --

    FRA: STFU GTFO