Utterly amazing stuff! The IBM breakthrough was amazing enough, but now we have images of the electron’s orbital path around a nucleus! This is good, good news, because until now physicists only had models and hypotheses to work with.
As was the case with the pentacene molecule with IBM (top left in the image), an atomic force microscope was used to capture the electron pathways, presented as darker grey bands in the other two images at centre and upper left. As a quick refreseher on AFMs, they’re the microscopes that use atom-sized needles to measure individual atoms that pass underneath the pointy end.
Understand matter and you’ll understand the Universe. Heady stuff! [NATURE VIA DVICE]
Mike
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:20 AMheheheh…homo…
EckyThump
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:31 AMYou have to understand just how small an atom is to really appreciate the scale of this achievement! If you scale an electrons orbit around its nucleus to the size of our Solar system, the Sun being the nucleus, an electron would be so far out past Pluto, it would boggle your mind! #]
Hotcarp
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 8:34 PMI wonder how Eisenberg would feel about this?
Scott
Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 8:59 PMHotcarp, I’d imagine he’d be a little uncertain