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Most Detailed Photos of an Atom Yet
BuzzSkyline writes "Ukrainian researchers have managed to take pictures of atoms that reveal structure of the electron clouds surrounding carbon nuclei in unprecedented detail. Although the images offer no surprises (they look much like the sketches of electron orbitals included in high school science texts), this is the first time that anyone has directly imaged atoms at this level, rather than inferring the structure of the orbitals from indirect measurements such as electron or X-ray interferometry."
looks like it was done in MS paint to me...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is amazing. We'd theorised orbitals to exist, and they worked very well. We could calculate the shapes of molecules and make detailed predictions that came true to 10 decimal places. Quantum mechanics as applied to electrons in atoms is the most successful and the most rigorously tested theory ever developed.
And yet, to finally see a real orbital, not a simulation. Looks like a 1s and a 2p, right there for the looking!
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
"Leo Gross and his colleagues at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, modified the AFM technique to make the most detailed image yet of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html
wot no sig
The ability to directly measure electron density is quite an old technique. STMs and AFMs have been doing this since the very beginning.. I agree with the researcher's quote in the article that it's good to develop a complementary technique(FEEM) abd at best that's its contribution. I'd be happy to hear what else it contributes. though I don't quite agree with his or the editors spelling! ;) "it's always good to have complimentary approaches,"
Trolling isn't your forte, is it?
The unscaled photo is here:
http://insidescience.org/polopoly_fs/1.918!image/671260397.jpg
There are other ones like this one or even the inside of one like here
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Now you can really grok what an atom looks like!
Particle porn! Could you shave off those electron clouds, now?
On my monitor, the unzoomed images are about 3cm across. This corresponds to a magnification factor of around 100 million! Awesome!
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html ....
because it is harder to have such a good picture of a molecule without destroying it
Why? Because the "orbitals" are actually solutions of the Schroedinger Wave Equation. They are images or a probability distribution in abstract space. Electrons are not clouds or points, they are things we don't really understand but describe by means of quantum mechanics. So I am deeply suspicious of the picture, because there is no physical object of that shape to image.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The article has a couple of images with a 'view full-size' link. I clicked the link and the images got larger. I thought atoms were itsy bitsy little geegaws.
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(not actual size)
I have always imagined atoms as I saw them in textbooks, a nucleus with balls spinning around it so fast it would look like a sphere. Now the first image holds up to this and looks about what I expected a photograph of an atom to look like. But I don't quite understand the second image. If those two ovals represent a single atom then why does it appear to split?
It states in the article that the photo is of "two states' of the atom. Does the electron cloud just flow around the atom in such a way as to make it appear to be splitting in the second picture?
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
... so bigger that CmdrTaco's manhood.
Actually, it's an impressive achievement, especially in that it matched predictions of what it would look like.
Here's a picture of a dupe, complete with comments.
It's not a dupe -- that was a different story, as you would know if you had compared TFA from each story.
Pirate Party UK
No way. Back in school, I theorised that throwing rocks at people's heads would hurt. For years, I used rigorous testing for sounds associated with pain to prove that correct.
So this is what's powering my netbook!
ignore. Reply done to undo bad moderation
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This looks shopped... I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time...
Could someone explain why the atom looks like a blob instead of the textbook planet and moon look alike(i.e. neutrons and protons and the planet and electron going around)?
Knowing Ukrainian scientific facilities' state and extremely poor level of funding, I must admit that such an achievement is a miracle! You all should welcome our new Ukrainian atom photographing overlords.
They do look like the classical orbitals, don't they?
However, there are some problems with interpreting the image as a photograph of an orbital. What the FEEM does is to charge up a very sharp point. The actual voltage may not be very big, but the local field strength depends on screening and curvature, so you can get very large electrostatic fields around sharp features, and if you get the balance right, electrons will leave the sharp points, zoom down the field lines, and get imaged. I remember seeing a sharp tungsten needle in a FEEM back in the seventies, and seeing the individual atoms. This sort of thing provided the first real evidence of a screw dislocation. You got a strange projection of the tip of the needle, as the electrostatic field tended to map the roughly spherical tip onto a flat plane.
So what is happening here? Our field stripping an electron from the orbital. We are getting a map of the electron flows as focused by the electrostatic field. We calculate the trajectory back through the electrostatic field and guess some sort of map of emission. They must have stripped hundreds or thousands of orbital electrons from the same atom, and replaced them to get each image. However, if an orbital 'pokes out' of the atom, or forms a 'sharp feature' (inverted commas because they are wave functions, so these concepts are a bit hard to define) then we get a bright spot. The really cool bit is getting the atom to go back to the same hybridization state hundreds of times, so we got the two-lobed picture.
It's dead clever. However, for my money, the atomic force probes are cooler as they can measure the fields without stripping the electrons. But, as the reviewer said, it takes all sorts...
Photo looks blurry... should have used a shorter exposure time.
They placed a rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber and streamed 425 volts through the sample.
I'm used to reading stuff like this in the main stream press. However, I would expect an article from insidescience.org wouldn't use such a nonsensical phrase. It's kind of like saying they streamed 425 pounds per square inch of water through a pipe.
...we now know what the Blue Man Group is composed of.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
... you can see Bigfoot in the background!
I'm a bit disturbed that this post has been modded informative. Even if it was my post ;)
Atoms are blue. I guess that explains why the sky is blue...it's full of atoms.
No Fair; They change the results by observing them.
Orbitals are not real ! They are mathematical constructs and they are not observables. People think that just because you can calculate something it is real, that is not the case.
That a derived quantity is "just" a calculated approximate model of some part of the universe doesn't mean it isn't real. Forget about orbitals and quantum mechanics, consider planetary orbits and classical mechanics. There is no such thing as a closed elliptical orbit as depicted in the textbooks. All orbits are unclosed.
Physics IS building models. Models are real even if they are incomplete:
http://www.revell.com/catalog/products/buzz_aldrin_rocket_hero.html
It may not be Buzz, but it shares the quality of physical existence with him. (And Buzz is himself not the man he was on the Moon.) The absurdity of Moon-landing deniers lies in the fact that each and every one of us spends our entire life embedded in outer space. Where else would be be? The evolving Earth is far more special a place than just another desiccated Moon.
They even got the colors wrong. In (b), one lobe should be yellow and the other red. Everybody knows that electrons aren't blue.
I still think atoms are fake. Heck that one pic looks like testicles
http://xkcd.com/331/
Bad day to be a carbon atom, eh?
Thanks for responding. This could do with some mod points but I can't mod and post...so I'll respond. It's interesting to think about what is happening here. It's possibly unhelpful to refer in the same sentence to "current" and "electrons" but I know what you mean, though I would rephrase it a little to help my own understanding. The "current" did not cause the carbon atom to give off electrons; rather, the potential difference enabled some electrons to pass along the carbon chain until they left the tip, and the path of the emerging electrons was probabilitistically interfered with in a way that reflected the solution of the Schroedinger wave equation for the outer electrons of the end atom. That's a very interesting experiment. The benefit of using carbon atoms in a molecule is that the bond angle presumably locks the orientation of the P orbitals sufficiently to enable the experiment. So for many atoms it simply wouldn't work, and what we are seeing here is not an image per se but something more like the result of the Rutherford/Geiger/Marsden experiment. It looks like a significant experiment, but the summary is quite wrong as to what is being shown.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
huh?
From TFA: "While tools like the scanning tunneling microscope already map the structure of electrons in a sample of many atoms, 'it's always good to have complimentary approaches,' Goldhaber-Gordon said."
It is indeed good to have approaches that are 'on the house,' so to speak...
"Complimentary coffee, muffins and electrons in the lobby every morning". :)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Not quite sure why I had to enable javascript for their website just to view an image.
Is that there's no way for a measurement to show the phase, so we could only see two P orbitals (l=1, |m|=0, 1) in the carbon atom. I wonder if they could compel the P orbital electrons to assume different quantum numbers and see if the pictures show the expected differences between the three different possibilities (both with same m, opposite m, m=0 and |m|=1). Or experimentally verify how electric/magnetic fields distort the orbitals and still get the emitted electrons to form a picture.
I look at lots o' atoms.
to a car?
Reply hazy, try again.
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Does anyone else see what looks like the Virgin Mary in the one on the left ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Because since Chernobyl, many atoms there are fit to burst. They're huge lumpy things you can just photograph with an 8MP snapshotter with a macro facility. I mean look at those photos ... they're obviously before and after fission shots, of something looking just like cells in a newly fertilised Godzilla zygote. Godzilla's genetically just a garden skink, but if you make him out of those giant burstable atoms, and he's huge. He'll lunch in Kiev and dine in Odessa.
Yep, that's definitely the gradient tool