No one has been able to X-ray an individual atom—until now.
, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory, and an author of the paper. “But it’s amazing what people don’t know. We cannot measure one atom—until now.”way back in 1955. Since the 1980s, atom-photographers’ tool of choice has been the scanning tunneling microscope . The key to an STM is its bacterium-sized tip. As scientists move the tip a millionth of a hair’s breadth above the atom’s surface, electrons tunnel through the space in between, creating a current.
But actually characterizing an atom—scanning the lone object, sorting it by its element, decoding its properties, understanding how it will behave in chemical reactions—is a far more complex endeavor. X-rays allow scientists to characterize larger batches of atoms. When X-rays strike atoms, they transfer their energy into those atoms’ electrons, exciting them. All good things must end, of course, and when those electrons come down, they release their newfound energy as, again, X-rays. Scientists can study that fresh radiation to study the properties of the atoms in between.That’s a fantastic tool, and it’s been a boon to scientists who need to tinker with molecular structures.
You can’t create a molecule-crunching machine with the X-ray source at your dentist’s office. To reach its full potential, you need a beam that is far brighter, far more powerful. You’ve got to go to a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron.
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