Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

petapixel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 88 posts

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#21

Post by Tsarbomb »

everdev wrote: post #17

I'm imaging that the process of "magnifying" objects through photography has to degrade the true representation of the object. Kind of like expanding 1 pixel to cover a 500x500px space. In that sense I wonder how clearly we can ever hope to see an atom. Obviously the technology and intent is impressive, but will we ever be able to see an atom more clearly or is it simply too small to be seen without Photoshopping in…

The internal structure of an atom is vastly different from the impression that most science books give you with their illustrations to the point that the question of us being able to clearly seeing an atom is almost nonsensical/doesn't make sense.

Atoms are much more nebulous than the concept of small indivisible balls of matter.

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#22

Post by cortesoft »

everdev wrote: post #17

I'm imaging that the process of "magnifying" objects through photography has to degrade the true representation of the object. Kind of like expanding 1 pixel to cover a 500x500px space. In that sense I wonder how clearly we can ever hope to see an atom. Obviously the technology and intent is impressive, but will we ever be able to see an atom more clearly or is it simply too small to be seen without Photoshopping in…

I don't think that is completely true... if you are using lenses to magnify, you aren't doing the same thing as expanding 1 pixel to 500x500. The light 'resolution' is already present, you are just spreading it out so you can see each bit more clearly.

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#23

Post by euyyn »

excalibur wrote: post #9
dgritsko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet color, the atom absorbs and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to capture it in a long exposure photograph.

That explanation doesn't really satisfy. Perhaps, based on a large body of experimental evidence, it is known that the number of atoms present can be determined by the apparent brightness. Perhaps it's something totally different. Regardless, it would be helpful if the author/photographer/somebody explained the rationale that makes them confident that this is only a single atom.

The article makes it sounds like the photographer already knew he could trap one atom, before taking the picture.

My guess would be, as this is an electromagnetic trap, that two such ions would repel each other and the well is set to be shallow enough that at most one ion can remain inside.

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#25

Post by msla »

Toast_25 wrote: post #20
abainbridge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...

Awesome, thanks! Do you know where I can find the other submissions? Particularly "In a kitchen far far away..."? It looks astounding!

Scroll to the bottom and click around the slideshow. It's in with a number of others not mentioned:

https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/single-trapped-atom-...

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#27

Post by msla »

ABCLAW wrote: post #15
excalibur wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explanation doesn't really satisfy. Perhaps, based on a large body of experimental evidence, it is known that the number of atoms present can be determined by the apparent brightness. Perhaps it's something totally different. Regardless, it would be helpful if the author/photographer/somebody explained the rationale that makes them confident that this is only a single atom.

Isn't hard to figure out when you've only got one ion in the trap: https://www.physik.hu-berlin.de/de/nano/lehre/quantenoptik09... Heck, you can line up ions in a row and take pictures of those if you'd like.

It's nice to have PDFs mark themselves as such...

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#28

Post by matthewmcg »

VohuMana wrote: post #5

Awesome picture! Could someone explain to me how a DSLR camera can capture an image of a single atop? I thought atoms were very very small, like so small only an electron microscope could "see" them. Maybe this device has been misrepresented and it is holding a small amount of atoms rather than a single one?

In exactly the same way that a camera can take a photograph of a star, which (for all but the Sun) is an infinitesimally small point of light. As long as the light intensity is higher than the background noise, it will render as a smeared out blob[1] due to diffraction.

[1] an Airy disk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#29

Post by ajuc »

excalibur wrote: post #9
dgritsko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet color, the atom absorbs and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to capture it in a long exposure photograph.

That explanation doesn't really satisfy. Perhaps, based on a large body of experimental evidence, it is known that the number of atoms present can be determined by the apparent brightness. Perhaps it's something totally different. Regardless, it would be helpful if the author/photographer/somebody explained the rationale that makes them confident that this is only a single atom.

They only put 1 atom there, and it's in vacuum. It can't be anything else because of that :)

Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

#30

Post by Jedd »

ars wrote: post #18
dgritsko wrote: post #3

This is an insanely cool picture. Some quick napkin math (please let me know if I'm way off base here): in the second pic, the electrodes are ~74 pixels apart and the strontium atom is ~2 pixels wide. The electrodes are ~0.078 inches apart, so these 2 pixels represent ~0.0021 inches (or ~0.05334 mm). Google tells me that the Van der Waals radius of a single strontium atom is 255 pm. So the diameter of the actual atom…

Analyze this photo instead: http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...

While the manual for my DSLR doesn't specifically refer to this use case, reading between the lines it sounds like using a jpg encoding for atomic-scale image capture isn't recommended.
Post reply on HN