Posted on 09/14/2012 7:55:26 PM PDT by neverdem
A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned.
The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings.
The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions.
The images are published in Science.
The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM.
AFM uses a tiny metal tip passed over a surface, whose even tinier deflections are measured as the tip is scanned to and fro over a sample.
The IBM team's innovation to create the first single molecule picture, of a molecule called pentacene, was to use the tip to pick up a single, small molecule made up of a carbon and an oxygen atom.
This carbon monoxide molecule effectively acts as a record needle, probing with unprecedented accuracy the very surfaces of atoms.
It is difficult to overstate what precision measurements these are.
The experiments must be isolated from any kind of vibration coming from within the laboratory or even its surroundings.
They are carried out at a scale so small that room temperature induces wigglings of the AFM's constituent molecules that would blur the images, so the apparatus is kept at a cool -268C.
While some improvements have been made since that first image of pentacene, lead author of the Science study, Leo Gross, told BBC News that the new work was mostly down to a choice of subject.
The new study examined fullerenes - such as the famous football-shaped "buckyball" - and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which have linked rings of carbon atoms...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Cool! And I’m right on the edge of HDTV being better than my own eyes.
It is positively amazing how much those old time physicists and chemists got right, with nothing more than pieces of paper and equations.
That is stunning.
So...the bees had it right all along.
Photoshopped.
Hebrews 1:3
King James Version (KJV)
3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high:
Note: UPHOLDING ALL THINGS BY THE WORD OF HIS POWER
that there explains alot...
A bowl full of those is breakfast cereal. Honeycomb!
we can actual see that well at those magnifications now??
The glue, the mysterious power that holds the universe together is the power of God. See post #8.
But I suspect you know this already, FRiend!
This is coming to an end! I heered myself that Ben Bernanke will be buying up the bonds at $40million a month rate. At that rate he’ll just buy these bonds up sos they can’t study them anymore.
Well, it’s not actual “sight” - the images aren’t being generated by the absorption or reflection of electromagnetic radiation (visible light rays), but rather are color-coded representations of the strength of the interaction of the probe (the CO “record needle”) and the atoms in the molecule that’s getting probed.
If the CO probe is close to a carbon atom, the resulting signal is presented as one shade of color; if it’s further away and there’s a weaker interaction, by a different color or shade. The full collection of those signal interpretations is the picture that’s shown in the article.
VERY cool image...
Bump.
cool.
Is that a description of what a scanning electron microscope does? or have they moved on from those?
It truly is!!
Groovy
Well, electron microscopy is a yet another technique, different from both standard light microscopy (the normal microscopes we’d use in school) and AFM (atomic force microscopy), the method that’s described in the paper. Actually, electron microscopy is probably closer to traditional light microscopy than it is to AFM.
It’s a really crude analogy, but AFM is almost like that old fable about the group of blind guys who touch an elephant and variously describe it as a snake (if one touches the tail) or a tree limb (if one touches the trunk) or a sheet (if one touches the ear), etc. Except in AFM, *all* those “touches” are recorded and graphed over a two-dimensional plot, so you get the “whole elephant”, and not just one bit.
In both EM and light microscopy, you’re getting info by the interaction of high energy particles (EM) or energy-rich photons (light microscopy) with the target in question. It’s just that when things get small enough (like individual molecules), the wavelengths of visible light aren’t short enough to do you any good in terms of building an image.
Where scanning EM is like AFM is that in both you are progressively moving a probe (your beam of electrons or your molecular “record needle”) in a systematic fashion across the target object.
OK, OK. I get it. Too technical for me. I don’t want to go back to school.
:p
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