Picture of an atom

Xeno

Yeah, I have been looking on the net and have not come up with anything.

Is there a picture of an atom? Like, a REAL picture, and not a drawing.

It would be great for my project if such a thing exists.

Thanks guys.

For the Future

That is impossible. Individual atoms are so small that no form of light could possibly bounce off of one in any meaningful way.

Thanatos

This is probably about the best thing you can find.

blincoln

Here's an image of a bunch of them in a lattice:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20040917-00

But it's not that exciting visually. I have trouble believing there are any right now that look better, though. Imaging something that small is hard.

Edit: what Thanatos posted is the kind of thing I went looking for. That's the best resolution of one I can imagine getting in this era.

Edit 2:

For the Future wrote:

That is impossible. Individual atoms are so small that no form of light could possibly bounce off of one in any meaningful way.

That's why they're imaged using things other than light.

Edit 3: I can't rule out the possibility that metamaterials could be used to image one with visible-light waves, because they *can* be used theoretically to make a lens that can resolve details smaller than the wavelength of the light being sensed, but I don't know what the limits on that are. It's definitely something that can't be done today.

matt has a problem

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html

The letters IBM, spelled out on a metal surface using single atoms, under a scanning tunneling microscope, from 1990.

fforde

For the Future wrote:

That is impossible. Individual atoms are so small that no form of light could possibly bounce off of one in any meaningful way.

Supposedly someone just created a material with a negative refractive index. I am not going to pretend I understand how it works, but (according to the article) this means someone could theoretically build an optical microscope able to magnify things smaller than the wavelength of light. So maybe it's not impossible. o.O

Not that that helps the OP...

For the Future

fforde wrote:

For the Future wrote:

That is impossible. Individual atoms are so small that no form of light could possibly bounce off of one in any meaningful way.

Supposedly someone just created a material with a negative refractive index. I am not going to pretend I understand how it works, but (according to the article) this means someone could theoretically build an optical microscope able to magnify things smaller than the wavelength of light. So maybe it's not impossible. o.O

Not that that helps the OP...

My God, the implications of this, could be... profound.

DrFrylock

You also have to understand the quantum mechanical difficulties with imaging an atom. One understanding of an electron is that it exists as a proability pattern in the shape of a sphere around the nucleus; it's not strictly a flying particle until you observe it, at which point it collapses into a point.

Captain Vash

I always imagined it like this.

I want a picture of a tennis ball, but my only photography tool is a sheet of metal and an old fashioned cannon.


I will never ever get a good picture of that tennis ball, no matter how many times I shoot my cannon at that tennis ball.

Doc

It's not like atoms would look particularly (heh) interesting anyway. They would be fuzzy dots.

Mad Jazz

Captain Vash wrote:

I always imagined it like this.

I want a picture of a tennis ball, but my only photography tool is a sheet of metal and an old fashioned cannon.


I will never ever get a good picture of that tennis ball, no matter how many times I shoot my cannon at that tennis ball.

I really, really like this analogy.

blincoln

Doc wrote:

It's not like atoms would look particularly (heh) interesting anyway. They would be fuzzy dots.

The shape of the electron orbitals can get pretty interesting.