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DailyDirt: Customized (Super) Atomic Particles…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Chemists haven’t quite mastered manipulating atoms and molecules, but physicists are making some progress in making/discovering all kinds of new particles — and not just sub-atomic scale particles. We’ve mentioned “super heavy hydrogen” before, but there are a few other unnatural bits of matter brewing in labs, too. Check out a few of them below.

• Powerful X-ray pulses can blast away the guts of atoms, making hollow atoms. Giant Rydberg atoms, antimatter atoms (e.g. antihydrogen) and elements beyond Ununoctium (atomic #118) are extremely difficult to observe (or create in the first place), but these particles might prove useful someday. But even if they don’t, it’s interesting to see how far we can push the boundaries of atoms and groups of sub-atomic particles. [url]
• Magnetic superatoms are clusters of atoms with electrons in orbitals that surround the entire cluster instead of just the individual atoms. A stable magnetic superatom VNa8 can be synthesized — but not in macroscopic quantities yet. These kinds of superatoms could have spintronics applications, but it’s really too early to make any kind of useful device out of these things. [url]
• A variant of atomic force microscopy can produce images of atomic bonds in molecules with amazing detail, gaining picometer resolution. Imaging at this scale could help develop molecular electronics and keep Moore’s law from faltering more than it already has. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: afm, antimatter, chemistry, hollow atoms, molecular electronics, moore's law, particles, physics, rydberg atoms, spintronics, super heavy hydrogen, superatoms, vna8

DailyDirt: Cool Advances In Atomic-Scale Imaging

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

You’re thirsty. You get yourself a glass of water. But have you ever wondered how many molecules of dihydrogen monoxide are in that glass of water? (There are around 8.35 x 1024 molecules in an 8-ounce glass of water, in case you’re curious.) And how cool would it be if you could actually see those tiny little molecules dancing around in that glass? While that’s still a challenge, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have managed to produce the first ever “action movies” showing individual water molecules moving across a palladium surface using a special scanning tunneling microscope. Here are a few more examples of some cool atomic-scale imaging breakthroughs.

• IBM researchers have created a short animated movie called A Boy and his Atom. They used a scanning tunneling microscope to move individual atoms, which act as pixels, to form pictures in each frame. According to Guinness World Records, this is the smallest movie ever made. [url]
• Researchers in Japan have devised a way to do X-ray crystallography without the need for an actual single crystal. The trick is to get the molecules in a sample to diffuse into a porous crystal structure, which then creates an ordered array of molecules that scatter X-rays like the atoms in a crystal. [url]
• Berkeley Lab researchers have imaged a single molecule with amazing resolution, showing individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them. Using non-contact atomic force microscopy, they imaged the molecule right before and right after a complex organic reaction, which clearly showed with single-bond resolution that the reactant molecule had transformed into various final products. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: afm, atomic resolution, atoms, imaging, molecules, nanotechnology, x-ray crystallograpy
Companies: ibm