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This Stunning Image Is The Highest Resolution We've Ever Seen Atoms

Physics01 September 2024
By Michelle Starr
This Stunning Image Is The Highest Resolution We've Ever Seen Atoms 
There are three types of atoms in this picture. (Cornell University)

All the normal matter in the Universe is made up of teeny tiny
building blocks that are far too small to be seen with the naked eye.

But we humans aren't about to let the physical limitations of our
eyes stop us from looking at things we want to see, right?

The image you see above was made back in 2021 by a team led by
physicist Zhen Chen, formerly of Cornell University and now at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences. Those dots are the atoms in the crystal
lattice of a piece of praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO[3]), at a
magnification of 100 million.

The only reason the image looks a little fuzzy around the edges is
not because the resolution is poor, but because atoms don't stop
jiggling about, which results in a little thermal motion blur.

No matter how good technology gets, though, that record-breaking
resolution is unlikely to ever be beaten. That's because there's a
limit to how much resolution we can achieve on these atomic scales,
and this is pretty much it.

"This doesn't just set a new record," said physicist David Muller of
Cornell University, when his team's results were published in Science
.

"It's reached a regime which is effectively going to be an ultimate
limit for resolution. We basically can now figure out where the atoms
are in a very easy way. This opens up a whole lot of new measurement
possibilities of things we've wanted to do for a very long time."

This achievement is the work of the pinnacle of atomic imaging
technology, a technique called ptychography.

Ptychography isn't actually a direct imaging technique, but a kind of
interferometry. That's the generation of an image from interference
patterns. Electrons were fired at a sample of praseodymium
orthoscandate; when these electrons hit the atoms in the material,
they bounced off.

By measuring the bounce patterns, or scattering, of these electrons
as the beam is moved around, the imaging system can generate an image
of what the electrons are bouncing off.

[atoms-body]Praseodymium orthoscandate imaged using ptychograpy. (
Cornell University)

Now, because praseodymium orthoscandate is a compound, what you see
here are three different kinds of atoms. The pairs of bright blobs
joined together are praseodymium. The single bright blobs are
scandium. And the faint red blobs are oxygen. All these atoms are
bound together to form the pure, perfect crystal imaged by Chen and
his colleagues.

The breakthrough in atomic imaging has implications and applications
for physics and engineering, granting us the magnificent ability to
study atomic structures in high-resolution and three dimensions. We
can use this for everything from materials science to quantum
communications.

"We want to apply this to everything we do," Muller said. "Until now,
we've all been wearing really bad glasses. And now we actually have a
really good pair. Why wouldn't you want to take off the old glasses,
put on the new ones, and use them all the time?"

The things humans can do when they really put their minds to it are
just incredible.

You can find the team's full paper in Science.

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