Scientist captures impossible photo of a single atom

[BillsCarnage]

Very cool.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...single-atom/ar-BBJ5C2U?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=PerDHP

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[AsUpRoDiGy]

That's gnarly...with a regular camera, nonetheless.

 

[puckhead]

Incredible!

I liked his little call out to Sagan:

“When I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon,” he said, “I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”

 

[Southpaw]

Adam.

 

[elindholm]

Cool, but misleading. It's the glow of fluoresced light radiating from the atom, not the atom itself. The dimensions of the actual atom are far smaller.

 

[BillsCarnage]

Cool, but misleading. It's the glow of fluoresced light radiating from the atom, not the atom itself. The dimensions of the actual atom are far smaller.

Yeah. The tips of those electrodes are 2mm apart, so that would make the atom bigger than a human hair. Still cool to capture that with a regular camera.

 

[cardncubfan]

Yeah. The tips of those electrodes are 2mm apart, so that would make the atom bigger than a human hair. Still cool to capture that with a regular camera.

Yup. 2mm is .078'' & a human hair is .003''. Basically the thickness of a sheet of paper.

 

[Russ Smith]

The company I used to work for, AOSense, is doing stuff like this in navigation that's pretty amazing. They cool atoms something called cold atom interferometry.

this stuff was always way over my head, outside of keeping the building running one of my roles there was figuring out how to legally ship sensors that contained very small amounts of strontium(like in the picture), cesium or rubidium. All of them are considered "dangerous when wet" metals that have very complex requirements for shipping.

http://gpsworld.com/darpa-advances-on-many-fronts-to-reduce-reliance-on-gnss/

It's still a ways off the systems are really too big right now. They want to put them in submarines(have to surface to use GPS) and they want to eventually use the technology in space but in both cases the size of a sensor is a huge deal since space is very limited in such situations.