Posted on 09/28/2010 10:51:41 PM PDT by neverdem
SAN FRANCISCO — I.B.M. scientists have modified a scanning-tunneling microscope, making it possible to observe dynamic processes inside individual atoms on a time scale one million times faster than has previously been possible.
The researchers have perfected a measurement technique in which they use an extremely short voltage pulse to excite an individual atom and then follow with a lower voltage to read the atom’s magnetic state, or spin, shortly afterward.
The resulting data produces the equivalent of a high-resolution, high-speed movie of the atom’s behavior.
The advance, reported Thursday in the journal Science, has potential applications in fields including solar energy technology, computer data storage and quantum computing.
The scanning-tunneling microscope was invented by I.B.M. researchers in 1981 in Switzerland. The systems are now in wide use, and make it possible to make images of individual atoms. While they have attained astounding spatial resolutions, however, they have been less precise in detailing physical processes that occur so quickly that their duration is measured in nanoseconds. A nanosecond — a billionth of a second — is to a second as one second is to 30 years, roughly.
“This technique is really nice because it allows us to measure how things change in time,” said Michael Crommie, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Obviously people have been doing this with other techniques for many years, but it has proven hard to do at very small time scales.”
The researchers said that the actual rate of change in the magnetic orientation of the atoms they were able to measure is several orders of magnitude faster than even the new technique. But they are able to slow down aspects of the process, which is described as “spin,” so that they are able to observe it at the nanosecond scale...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He said a mouthful. Cf. The Story of Spin by Tomonaga
Obama speaking again?
That is an excellent book.
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FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Thanks for the link.
You beat me to it.
What does Heisenberg have to say about this?
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