this takes the cake for great desktop backgrounds.
Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#32This 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…
I was just thinking that the atom has to be letting off (reflecting) some serious quantity of light in order for just one to appear with off the shelf camera equipment.
I still don't get it, 10,000 times more light than its size?
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just thinking that the atom has to be letting off (reflecting) some serious quantity of light in order for just one to appear with off the shelf camera equipment.
I still don't get it, 10,000 times more light than its size?
They say it was a long exposure.
The atom was illuminated and irradiated light for a long enough time to register on the sensor.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get it, 10,000 times more light than its size?
They say it was a long exposure. The atom was illuminated and irradiated light for a long enough time to register on the sensor.
Even if the exposure were for a year, if the amount of light being emitted is less than the hardware can perceive, it wouldn't register - hence the need for electron-microscopes and such. There's a story here about the size of the light being emitted that doesn't seem satisfactorily answered (not by you, the article and stuff in general).
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#35I love what I assume is a winking "pale blue dot" reference in the quote at the end.
It's the same idea, isn't it? A single pixel with a whole lot of meaning added to it.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
Sadly those aren't the high-resolution photos. If you look at the link abainbridge shared you'll notice the image is a LOT higher resolution than the ones in the link you shared.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#37David Nadlinger, the photographer, is an avid contributor to the D programming language[1]. He works on LDC compiler[2], the LLVM backend for D.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say it was a long exposure. The atom was illuminated and irradiated light for a long enough time to register on the sensor.
Even if the exposure were for a year, if the amount of light being emitted is less than the hardware can perceive, it wouldn't register - hence the need for electron-microscopes and such. There's a story here about the size of the light being emitted that doesn't seem satisfactorily answered (not by you, the article and stuff in general).
Maybe it's light reflected by the atom at multiple points? The article mentions that it's "held nearly motionless" but over a long exposure perhaps the degree of movement allowed created a composite large enough to show up in the photo.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say it was a long exposure. The atom was illuminated and irradiated light for a long enough time to register on the sensor.
Even if the exposure were for a year, if the amount of light being emitted is less than the hardware can perceive, it wouldn't register - hence the need for electron-microscopes and such. There's a story here about the size of the light being emitted that doesn't seem satisfactorily answered (not by you, the article and stuff in general).
> Even if the exposure were for a year, if the amount of light being emitted is less than the hardware can perceive, it wouldn't register
That is not true. It might be noisy, but it would show up.
In point of comparison the human eye can see a single photon.
A single atom can emit a single photon, ergo you can see a single atom.
You won't get any detail out of it obviously, but you'll see it as a dot of light.
That's what's happening here.
> There's a story here about the size of the light being emitted that doesn't seem satisfactorily answered
You are misunderstanding the "size". The size "10,000" is the resolution needed to differentiate between two atoms sitting next to each other.
But in order to see the atom (detect the atom), you just need to be able to capture what it emits. And it emits photons, and it's not that hard to capture and record a single photon.
So you do, and it shows up as a single dot in the image.
If you had two atoms near each other, both emitting photons, you would not be able to distinguish them from each other (i.e. you couldn't say if there were one or two), unless they were farther apart.
Re: Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the exposure were for a year, if the amount of light being emitted is less than the hardware can perceive, it wouldn't register - hence the need for electron-microscopes and such. There's a story here about the size of the light being emitted that doesn't seem satisfactorily answered (not by you, the article and stuff in general).
Maybe it's light reflected by the atom at multiple points? The article mentions that it's "held nearly motionless" but over a long exposure perhaps the degree of movement allowed created a composite large enough to show up in the photo.
No, that's not it. Just because it is small, doesn't make it invisible.
You can't see single atoms because they normally don't send any light toward you. But if they did, and this one is, you would see that light.
You aren't seeing the atom exactly, you are seeing what it sends toward you, and the human eye can see single photons. (And so can cameras.)