IBM Takes First 3D Image of Atomic Bonds
From what I remember of chemistry, molecules were presented on computer screens, or at the very least with dowels and balls. Thanks to this incredible discovery, however, I’m jealous of how tomorrow’s engineers will view—and control—nature’s building blocks.
Now, the picture above is pretty unremarkable, right? Black and white (trivia: molecules have no colour), grainy, shot in the kind of out-of-focus manner you expect from a guy like me, who can’t seem to venture out beyond the Auto setting on his entry-level Nikon D40 DSLR. But wait a second. Doesn’t the image kind of seem, well, familiar? Like high school chem class familiar? Balls and sticks familiar?
Here’s another image; a computer generate image that’s much more at home for anyone who studied atoms and molecules in the dead and gone days of 1997:
Make sense now? That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the “specimen”—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometre-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.
You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it’s thanks to this: an atomic force microscope.
Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an “ultrahigh vacuum” and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometres. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometres above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.
And that’s the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.
Quirky, Quarky, Quantum Computing That IBM, a hardware company, was the entity to accomplish this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don’t yet know) about quantum computing. Said an IBM representative in an email to me this morning, “This pioneering achievement and the new insights gained from the experiments extend the ability of scientists to study matter with atomic resolution and open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale-devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today’s processors and memory devices.”
In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds, as well as create powerful, energy-sipping quantum computers for their cryptography needs, space travel or maybe even large black and yellow rooms that make our fantasies come true (or at the very least allow androids to play Sherlock Holmes).
But not so fast, Einstein. I see that tabletop subspace communicator you’ve imagined on your desktop. It’s a great idea, and while I understand your enthusiasm for such things, as Matt explained earlier this month quantum computing, entangled desktops and Star Trek holodecks are all decades away, if not more.
What this discovery does do however is advance our primitive understanding of the Way Things Are. It’s a small, nanometre-sized piece in a puzzle that doesn’t even have all the pieces on the table yet. Hell, we don’t even know where all the pieces are yet. From the looks of these images though, we will someday soon. [Images: IBM]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Also, you don't need a quantum computer or even a super computer to simulate AI, it's pretty much *ALL* programming...and *LOTS* of it. I've worked a lot on the Lady C bot, which uses parts of the Alice and Eliza bots as its base code and many people can't tell the difference between the bot and a real person, even over the course of long conversations. Also, multi-state computing, being able to deal with moar than just 1s and 0s, isn't really all that incredible, we'll actually likely see it start coming into form with the next few publicly released optical disk incarnations, which will be able to burn holes at different depths, instead of simply simply making smaller holes which is what's done at present. We're down to 405 nanometers with Blu-Ray. Original CDs burned 650 nanometer holes.
Onideus
It’s clear from these messages that people are fascinated by the question, "What would an atom look like if we were able to view it close-up and see how electrons create the atom’s quantum architecture." In the nineteen twenties, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle dimmed the prospect for any such a picture no matter the most advanced technology imaginable. That discover bought most physicists to view any further search for a model that might try to describe how electrons behave in the atom as simply non-science or metaphysics – or at best an artwork.
Over these eight decades, despite all that science and technology have produced, the world is no closer to understanding how electrons move about the atomic space than it was eighty years ago.
The situation in atomic physics is something like that of Ptolemaic astronomy whose mathematics worked well enough for eighteen hundred years to satisfy people that the Sun orbited the earth; until Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo showed that it was the other way around.
I’m one of those who believe that QM is not the whole story and that by finding the right analog model a better understanding of the atom is possible.
I have one such offering – a long running artwork I call "Portrait of an Atom". See:
[www.snelsonatom.com]
and:
[www.kennethsnelson.net]
k_snelson
Hi Mondoz,
I agree with your thoughts about color not existing at the molecular level, but I question the limitations you place on the idea of a photographs. After all, any image created by a sensor that records spatial data due to interactions with the sensor can be (in my opinion) called a photograph. Yes, photo from Greek meaning light, but we have plenty of images that are created from stimuli to which the visual system is not sensitive and yet we still call them photographs. What'd think?
--Bob
ReginaBabalonian
Geez.. How people can be that stupid.
1.It's black and white because it is not a photo.
2.Molecules are not black and white. If you were able to detect photons coming from molecules, you would be able to see color. Molecules absorb and emit photons. Photons carry a particular wavelength.
Geez... Is it a Yankee school of science? IBM?
NormaDawls
@aec007:
To all of ya:
I KNOW what quantum computer will do... the 0, 1 and the 01 or 10 due to the duality of quantum states that the answer yield.
I know all that.
Please everyone realize that when and if we get to manufacture a QC chip, it will not be in the 200+ million transistor range that the latest CPU's, GPU's, and GPGPU's are built nowadays.
The will be the equivalent of a Z80 or a PIC processor to start.
Even though it might hace the POTENCIAL to make any of today's chips obsolete by the sheer number of flops it will able to compute (That is all the possibilities within the quantum state of answers), it will only be as good as a program can take advantage of it.
Imagine of someone giving you a freshly made PC without any OS.
Is it any good? NO. It's useless until you load an OS and program to something with it.
Even though any supercomputer currently used in the world HAS the potencial to become a very convincing human and have a compeling AI than no one could discern from while talking to... the best AI programs today, fail misserably.
SO even though you have incredible untapped power in a QC, it will only be as good as the program the runs it.
That is the point i'm trying to make.
:)
aec007
@PridgNYC: oppositely charged particles attract each other. It is called Coulomb's law in physics.
atenrok
@A Pimp Named DaveR:
> In the case of gold, the individual gold atoms and molecules will absorb bluish (higher-energy) photons, and reflect (not absorb) the yellowish ones.
being a metal, gold absorbs pretty much everything, since there is non gap and Fermi level is located in conductance band. Later it re-emmits the photons of certain wavelength, and that is where the color comes from.
You're welcome.
atenrok
@weshirecat tells it in the form of a question?: I wouldn't count them out yet, they did it once they can do it again.
JymmyZ
Ugh. Sorry, this article and the IBM press release both leave a lot to be desired (don't have the research article handy to see what the authors actually say). Sorry in advance for the length of this:
An AFM isn't like an electron microscope, it is much closer to a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). IBM-Zurich's involvement here isn't surprising. They did develop the STM in 1981 (winning Binning and Rohrer the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986) and have continued to be a leader in scanning microscopies. Binning actually was involved in the development of the AFM.
Those would be molecular bonds, not atomic bonds.
The b&w image is not an "image" of the molecule. It is the data obtained from the deflection of the AFM tip (it's where the laser comes into all of this). Since they were 0.5 nm above the surface, they were likely operating in what everyone refers to as non-contact mode, so we are looking at tip deflection caused by changes in the local electronic structure near the tip. Given the 20 hour acquisition time, this is probably a composite of several hundred data acquisitions.
The IBM press release stupidly talks about "looking through the electron cloud" when everything the AFM tip is interacting with is the electron cloud.
Why the use of scare quotes around ultrahigh vacuum? Ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) refers to a pressure range of about 10^-9 torr to ~10^-12 torr. It's necessary to do almost anything on/with a chemically clean reactive surface. Google UHV and you'll find lots of pictures of shiny stainless steel equipment (often covered in aluminum foil).
And while this is some beautiful work by IBM, it's not the first time people have imaged internal structure of molecules (though it might be the first time someone has done it with AFM). There isn't anything surprising in this data. The last couple of paragraphs probably oversell the importance of this paper.
-Before people jump down my throat: Yes, I have worked with UHV systems for years and I've occasionally spent more hours than I would like to remember staring at STM and AFM data and arguing over the proper interpretation of the data with respect to data/interpretations from multiple other surface science techniques.
I'm drunk, but even I know this.
Color is not a low-level property, better to think of it as "energy absorption".
Different materials handle different wavelengths of energy in different way, so really it's about what light is coming in, vs what light is refracted, absorbed and reflected.
Reality uses more of a subtractive color model like CMYK, where everything is white originally, but if it absorbs all light it's black, if it absorbs only blueish wavelengths its yellow.
Color is just a interpretation of our reality, E.g. if we saw infrared and uv, color would be completely different to us. Molecules themselves would not have color though, it would be more of the large-scale object and it's interaction with light energy. A few stray molecules alone probably will have very little effect on a photon as observed by a human.
OswaldAndraemon
@A Pimp Named DaveR: very nice explanation +1
echo off
Color is just the human perception of a very specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The entire spectrum covers all light- even the types we can't perceive directly like microwaves or radio waves. Sharks and snakes, for example, are able to detect other parts of the EM spectrum, but we could not imagine how their brains perceive that. EM radiation transfers energy, and, in the end, all of our senses measure and detect energy in different ways.
XylonEros
@shenanigans61: so is beer.... checkmate, I believe.
sqeakytoy of the apocalypse
3D, huh? It's a good thing these aren't the guys filming Avatar.
trs
This is exciting as long as it takes you to realize that it's just more chem. In disguise!
Although it mentions AFM the image that illustrates on this post is from a STM [en.wikipedia.org]
It makes more sense to be a STM since that was initially developed by IBM.
markps
@A Pimp Named DaveR: We actually have an AFM at my work that I use just about every day. Generally the color of the image is just a feature of the software. Usually brighter means taller and darker means shorter, but they actually provide all kinds of collor gradients to be able to see different aspects of the scan more clearly. It can also convert the scans into 3d models that you can move around and whatnot.
BombrMan
You guys are all stupid, the balls aren't the atoms, the corners are the atoms (Carbons).
Just kidding, I'm sure that's what you meant.
@reddingofish: Well, technically, previously in my future's past, it was right now, back then... I think?
valkilmerisawful
horrible explanation get back to JuniorHigh Chem... the main reason would be that atom themselves are too small to reflect the electromagnetic waves we call light (the visible spectrum).
DesireeGodinka
In other words, color comes from reflection.
demidan
@aec007: Well, like the others above me said, you have it partially right. The main difference being that quantum computers have different methods of processing. Instead of the normal Binary method we are used to machines using where the only choices for the bits are 0 or 1 (or more simply, on or off) the quantum machine can work in a third method as well, both on and off at the same time. While we do indeed have some extremely powerful supercomputers now (Earth simulators etc), none of them could come even close to doing what it is thought an operating quantum computer could do.
Rybones2112
But if I remember Heisenberg correctly.......then they probably altered the atoms while they were taking the picture. So, its not really how the atoms look.....
@[en.wikipedia.org]
"Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light energy versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors."
@artistpavel: That's the beauty of the scientific method. You look at the way the world works, make theories based on evidence, make predictions from the theories, test the predictions, and after a long enough time, you have a pretty good idea that your theory is correct or not. If you can find a book on the history of how we discovered the nature of atoms, how they combine into chemicals and how chemicals react with each other, it's actually totally fascinating.
Ribs
@artistpavel: Science. It works, bitches.
Xterm11: ESCAPED YOUR HYPERLINK
@natural selection: i wholeheartedly agree. The amount of time that could be saved from not having to analyse molecular interactions using approximate methods is just staggering.
and students can learn bonds and understand them much easier by looking at it directly, rather than some vague pages in a textbook telling us how it would all look like.
Acidzburns
@Mondoz: Color happens when a material absorbs all wavelengths of light except certain ones. In the case of gold, the individual gold atoms and molecules will absorb bluish (higher-energy) photons, and reflect (not absorb) the yellowish ones. The sum total of billions upon billions of these mini transactions is you perceiving the material as gold.
But on the molecular level, the atoms and molecules themselves have no color -- they don't reflect "light", they reflect or absorb individual photons. Think of it as being the difference between a pixel and an image.
The photo above isn't really a "photo" at all -- it's a visual representation of non-visual data, in this case, the data recorded by the needle about where it is being stopped by whatever is underneath it. Add up all the distances, and you get a 3-d model -- or if you assign shades of light/dark to the relative heights, a black and white picture like this. It's sort of like those things that are made up of a ton of little wires, and you press your hand into it to get a 3-d "image" or your hand.
Good job IBM, unfortunately, this:
[www.oracle.com]
You're looking at now sir...Everything that happens now is happening now.
What happened to then?
We passed it.
When.
Just now... We're at now now.
Go back to then?
When?
Now.
Now?
Now.
I can't
Why?
We missed it.
When?
Just now.
asten77
@appletoad: HAHA!
tomsomething
"trivia: molecules have no color"
They don't? Then where does color come from?
Why wouldn't gold atoms be golden?
Mondoz
@banmojo: You're going to use MATH and SCIENCE to DISCREDIT atheism? Holy irony, Batman!
tomsomething
It's not the electrons trying to keep away from each other, it is the electrons trying to put as much distance between themselves and the protons. You have a higher concentration of protons in the center of that molecule so the electrons will tend to the two ends. It's called electron pushing in Organic Chem.
PridgNYC
@banmojo: Versus the hand of some being that has always existed creating said cells?
@citizen024: hahaha, thread promoted for awesome star gate reference that made me laugh.
@citizen024: hahaha, thread promoted for awesome star gate reference that made me laugh.
@aec007: thats not entirely true. because quantum computing doesnt use binary, there are more than just 2 states in a quantum computer. so you cant really compare them to today's hardware, because its different. in the future we will have both the current tech of processors AND QCs working in unison or in series. or any combination thereof. So a QC that has the same processing power as a core i7 wont be used in the same way that a core i7 would be used.
@spinal77: You sound smart. Can you tell me if my pants are on backwards? I have to do a handstand whenever I need to pee.
@spinal77: You sound smart. Can you tell me if my pants are on backwards? I have to do a handstand whenever I need to pee.
@StupidSimple: While you're at it check out Cryptonomicon (hence my name) and Anathem
EpiphyteCorp.
Time to start taking pictures of every molecule we know!
how exciting
Well if you are going to say that molecules "have no color", I'll raise you one and point out that that is because of the obvious reason that they cannot be seen at all -- they are invisible, being much too small to be seen with light. Hence the use of an atomic force microscope, which is not optical at all, but more like a blind man's cane.
SatiAstral
@rabbibert: Survive the next 20 years? We'll see what the Mayans have to say about that.
Brett Benedict
@StupidSimple: You should check out "Snow Crash", also by Stephenson. It's set in the future, albeit maybe not quite so distant as "Diamond Age". It's insane and a really fun read. And I highly recommend "Cryptonomicon" as well.
@darrinjc: Thank you Schrodinger.
Joe Valasek
@Jrsy Devil's Food Cake®: Honey, ordinary honey...
Brett Benedict
@b.dave: Maybe you're the same as me,
we see things they'll never see.
Brett Benedict
@Pope John Peeps II: well yea my comment was in fact in jest. and i didn't even see your comment when i made mine originally. i wouldn't be surprised to find my country was actually the same as your country :O
slyman928
Such news make me want to live forever.
b.dave
@slyman928: Just out of curiosity, does your country have jokes?
I like where this is taking us - soon we'll be able to prove mathematically that having a prokaryotic cell magically appear out of primordial soup via the random interaction of raw matter and raw energy bumping into each other through finite time, is, well, strictly in the realm of 'magic'.
banmojo
@aec007:
You've got it kind of wrong. Normal computers can only solve certain types of problems. They operate in a deterministic and ordered pattern to arrive at an end result the programmer has told the system how to compute.
There are in fact, certain examples of problems that a normal computer cannot solve. For instance, factoring on a normal computer is an exponential process. There are tricks to bring it down, but its the whole reason encryption as we have it now: the time to brute force the factorization would take longer than the age of the universe.
Quantum computers are specialized computers (and YES they HAVE been built already, albeit they are very unstable and only stay in sync for a matter of minutes and are only in the order of 1-4 qubits) that can make all of the calculations that the normal computer above would make ALL in PARALLEL, arriving at a solution in polynomial time.
These are not meant to be computers on your lap, at least for not another 50-100 years. These are specialized systems doing specialized jobs, just like the first modern computers were doing in the 1950's.
@StupidSimple: You should check out Ray Kurzweil's stuff. He has some very interesting ideas on where he see's technology going in this next 100 years and that at the rate we are going right now, we could see a millennium of technological advancement in that 100 year period. According to him, you pretty much have to survive the next 20 years and at that point we'll be able to extend the average humans life span pretty significantly.
rabbibert
Bonds, Atomic Bonds...
@sqeakytoy of the apocalypse: The cat is dead.
darrinjc
Crap, now I'm gonna have to scrap that paper I was going to submit to Scientific America...I was almost certain this picture would have finally revealed little fairies holding hands swinging each other in circles. Curse you science, you win again!
trampas
This is impressive, but I think the fan fare around quantum computing is a lot of hype and a lot less of substance.
Case in point: Let's say we DO have a quantum computer in a few years.
Quantum computers (QC's)are said to be an order of magnitude in computing power that will unleash incredible AI devices, talking computers etc...
We do have, not one but several supercomputers around that would equal what QC chip would do.
Yet, do not see true AI anytime soon.
The key: Programming.
I DO see QC being so small and using so much less power that, yes, one day we may have a laptop as thin as a sheet of paper, or a phone in a paper clip, so long as the way we humans interact with them makes sense...
So, although you might have some day a QC with the power of a Core i7 in a pin's head, it will still be an i7 in power, not a God sent do-it-all chip, and it will be subject to all the same programming problem we see today.
aec007
@artistpavel: I know that they use a procedure called Crystallography to study molecule structure. You can look it up on google.
How did they discovered and illustrated molecules without ever seeing them in the first place?
@Kaiser-Machead: I was thinking 20/20.
"In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds,"
i read: future engineers will make replicators like in star trek (hopefully not like in star gate).
i want: now.
I'm reading Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" which is quite an interesting book and also difficult to read at the same time. Nanotechnology is the future. I just hope I live to see the wonders coming from it (and die before the horrors come)
This really is a monumental achievement of humankind. I took organic chemistry 2 years ago, and wouldn't have believed this could be done until I saw that picture. Absolutely beautiful, and awe inspiring.
@appletoad: I lol'd. I thought I was looking at a super blurry close-up of my screen door.
Twanzio
@kernel panic: "The relatively slow rate of scanning during AFM imaging often leads to thermal drift in the image."
@kernel panic: my guess and I'm not anywhere near a quantum physicist or nuclear engineer is that since this photo was taken at ~5K and not absolute zero there is still some atomic movement going on. I'm thinking that the "flare" is actually electrons which is pretty freaking cool.
David Wilde
@Fantasysage: We will all live in the future tomorrow.
reddingofish
@BuckCabelas: technically we'll never live in the future just like we will never live in yesterday. we were there but wen we were it wasnt yesterday it was today.
slyman928
@jeroenstuyts: Yeah, it's nice to see that our models are fairly accurate even while they admit they are simplified to better illustrate. It's a real trip.
Maori_Yelir
@BigDogues: Duuuuuuuuuuude
Fantasysage
*takes super blurrycam picture of vga port*
LOOK! I HAZ SCIENCE!
"this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don't yet know) about quantum computing."
Hey, don't let the cat out of the bag! aw crap. Back to the drawing boards men.
sqeakytoy of the apocalypse
@Kaiser-Machead: Abrams for sure. the microscope is still keeping some molecular secrets away from us. dragging it on as it were.
deliciousburglar
@Kaiser-Machead: Abrams for sure. the microscope is still keeping some molecular secrets away from us.
deliciousburglar
@BigDogues: but when will that be?
you just missed it.
When?
Right now.
sqeakytoy of the apocalypse
@Pope John Peeps II: Too fuzzy to be Abrams. I'd say Spielberg, who likes that sort of bright fuzz and out-of-focus look. Maybe Soderberg?
Kaiser-Machead
@Pope John Peeps II: Looks like he contracted out to Mr. Atomic Blurrycam.
dingus
What a trip! Add on image recognition and 3D simulation and we will be staring at rotating 3D molecules in real time.
Talk about a Star Trek moment.
FrankenPC
@jeroenstuyts: Now that I think of it, I'm pretty glad it's exactly the same. It shows that our theory's are pretty correct and that might be an even bigger acomplishment.
imagine that image being something completely else ...
Now seriously: wow!
That's incredible. I nearly failed chemistry and even I can appreciate that.
Maori_Yelir
@Kaiser-Machead: How many times have I told you kids not to make buckyballs in the house!?
I say it's 'shopped!
Seriously, though, it sounds like this is one of those bits of tech news that will be forgotten about, but will have wide ranging consequences in tech advancement.
@BuckCabelas: haha. I picture you with a pencil and a stopwatch, eternally trying to pin down WHEN the future happens EXACTLY.
That. Is. Awesome.
Nothing else needs to be said.
@Fantasysage: Not yet we don't.
OK, now we do.
No wait, now...
No, now...
BigDogues
@kernel panic: That would make sense as repulsive forces would keep them as far away from each other as possible.
cabjf
@kernel panic: J J Abrams directed the microscope. What you're seeing is atomic lens flare.
... now we live in the future - no, wait - NOW - wait , now...
BuckCabelas
is that glare, or do the electrons spend the majority of their time at the extreme left or right of the conjugated system?
kernel panic
It's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's.....you get the point
BergenCountyJC
Makes me wonder what kind of mad magic these witch doctors will conjure up next, reducing my now tech-oriented mind into an old Luddite-esque mush. I can see myself now, screaming at those damn kids that keep materializing out of thin air on my lawn.
Kaiser-Machead
Holy shit. We live in the fucking future man.
Fantasysage