Electron Strobe Makes Movies of Atoms

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."

Comments

Very import research

[moteyalpha]

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.