Have you ever seen an atom?

have you ever seen an atom seeing as everything's made of them you have but have you ever seen one on its own over time microscopes have become more and more powerful allowing us to see deeper into the world of the ultra small traditional light microscopes can be used to see things like these onion cells and the structures within them as they divide pulling apart their chromosomes but scientists have come up with a whole host of clever methods to observe far smaller things using beams of electrons instead of light we can generate detailed images of chromosomes themselves recently groups of scientists around the world are becoming able to see materials at the most fundamental scale the atomic one group from the University of California in Los Angeles have been getting up close and personal with nanoparticles of platinum just a few nanometers across each of the tiny dots you can see here are actually individual platinum atoms but researchers didn't stop at a two-dimensional picture by imaging over a hundred slices of the nanoparticle at different angles then removing the noise with a special filter they were able to map the location of almost every atom the information was used to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the whole particle in unprecedented detail it may look blurry but this particle is estimated to contain over 27,000 atoms and so like flies in a swarm they appear to merge together every so often though we see the Platinum's atomic structure align granting us a moment of clarity this technique is being used to analyze tiny irregularities in the structure of the particle called dislocations dislocations are subtle like the misalignment of the green and red layers of atoms in this particle but nonetheless they can significantly change the properties of materials with effects ranging from a change in the efficiency of LEDs to the strength of metal alloys three-dimensional atomic-scale imaging like this is bettering our understanding of the structure of materials on this truly fundamental scale you

Channel: nature video

Views: 12,420,159

Rating: 4.7915826 out of 5

Keywords: atoms, microscope, nature, science, platinum, nano, particle, nanoparticle, imaging, UCLA, Univeristy of California, California, Los Angeles, LA, atom, atomic, Computer, image, research, lab, Technology, Physics, electron, electron tomography, fourier filtering, 3d, three dimensional, resolution, scale, dislocation, dislocations, LED, alloy, structure, Gadget, Experiment, transmission

Id: yqLlgIaz1L0

Length: 2min 32sec (152 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

We didnt get to see one on its own.

[u/jw_pratt]

Have you ever seen an atom

Little bits of everything floating by

Take a good look at them

Collectively they compose all you see including your eye

-John Popper Blues Traveler

[u/Nick_Parker]

Some people in my research group are working with quantum dots and needed to study how much they contact each other after being precipitated from a solution/mixture (not actually sure how that bit works..) and in the lab presentation they had an image of several hundred dots with color coded markings showing how many atoms wide the connections from dot to dot were.

My adviser spent about 5 minutes going "That's a picture of atoms? We can take those?"

[u/[deleted]]

that was great, ty!

[u/Brudus]

No, I have never seen an aHtom.

[u/gurbur]

have you ever seen a cats eyes in the dark?

[u/webdevbrian]

Did that video just say "www.nature.com/nature" ... lol

[u/[deleted]]

Everything I've ever seen has been an atom.

[u/milkshakeconspiracy]

I work with these types of images on a daily basis for my job.

If you are interested in learning more about the imaging techniques used in the video it is called tomography in a transmission electron microscope.

To produce images like these a beam of electrons is passed through the nanoparticle. Since the wavelength of the electrons is about the same as the inter-atomic spacing between atoms the crystal acts as a sort of diffraction grating. This produces an interference pattern which contains information about the positions of the atoms in the lattice.

The fuzzy dots do not necessarily correspond to the exact position of an atom in real space but that doesn't matter because tons of useful atomic scale information is contained within the image. In the case of the video the interesting information was the type and position of the crystalline defects. I ran some simulations a few years back demonstrated this effect: http://i.imgur.com/7K9V72k.png

The position of the fuzzy dots is actually dependent upon several microscope settings and the thickness of the particle.