Atoms in Action

This movie produced with Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 microscope shows the growth of a hole and the atomic edge reconstruction in a graphene sheet. An electron beam focused to a spot on the sheet blows out the exposed carbon atoms to make the hole. The carbon atoms then reposition themselves to find a stable configuration. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/03/26/atoms-in-action/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• physics
• atoms
• microscopic
• electron beam
• carbon atom
• carbon atoms
• atom
• Berkeley Lab
• Lawrence Berkeley
• microscope
• TEAM 0.5
• nano
• TEAM
• DOE
• nanotech
• nanotechnology
• nanoscience
• graphene
• atomic
• science

[bborps]

Ten years ago I was told we would never be able to see atoms.

I wonder what they're telling kids nowadays.

[didsaid]

Wow. That made my day. Good job.

[fundamentalscience]

Fantastic!

[chibraxial]

@insanewarlock616

These are not actual "views" of atoms, since no photons are used to scan the atomic surface. :)

These are made using electrons, not photons, the image is then reconstructed ..that's why there are "no colours" .

[b1odome]

@insanewarlock616 This is not an optical microscope, it's a lot more complicated microscope, involving electron particles. With an usual optical microscope, you can see the colors, because the light reflects them. When you look trough electron microscopes, you can't see the colors, because there is no light. There are just electron generated images. Electrons are either stopped by the particles being observed, or they are let trough. Depending on this, the computer generates an image.

[Kalywonkas]

@insanewarlock616 A lot of them are because of the use of an STM microscope, which uses a tiny needle, usually a carbon nanotube to probe the "bumps" on the surface of an object, so of course it's given in false colour black and white as a height gradient. In addition to this, at this level objects don't interact with and emit light in the same way...

[alex3st]

Beacause it isnt microscopic its an interpretation of a surface onto which electrons are bombarded, the interpretation is the impression made by the returning electrons.

[Neutrinoghost]

@insanewarlock616 Because these particular images are not really "pictures", they are manipulated images based on data from forces acting on very sensitive probes. Atoms are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so colour doesn't exist on these scales.

[SteveArpo]

One of the most believable yet unbelievable videos ever.

[giftkrieger]

@insanewarlock616 To my knowledge, a scanning electron microscope only images the intensity of the electron beam after it interacts with the sample. Just like with visible light, variations in intensity result in brighter and darker areas. But an SEM doesn't discriminate based on electron wavelength the way your eye does with photons.

[Teghead]

@insanewarlock616

The "TEAM" microscope uses electron beams with wavelengths of roughly 3 pm, visible light is 390 - 750nm

10pm = 1nm = 10^-9 m

So electron beam wavelengths are ~ 1000 x smaller than beams of light. Thanks to this you can see more detail, but electrons do not carry any information about the absorptive/reflective properties of materials in the optical light spectrum (colour).

This TEAM microscope is very impressive, in greatly improving the limitations from lenses etc!

[Teghead]

@insanewarlock616

In this case, the image is constructed by bouncing electrons off the object, not visible light. With optical microscopes, where the output is visible light, images are in colour. In some cases only blue light is used in optical microscopy, as its shorter wavelength allows greater resolution (visible detail).