
Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest - gokhan
https://petapixel.com/2018/02/12/picture-single-atom-wins-science-photo-contest/
======
arunc
David Nadlinger, the photographer, is an avid contributor to the D programming
language[1]. He works on LDC compiler[2], the LLVM backend for D.

[1] [http://klickverbot.at/](http://klickverbot.at/)

[2] [https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc](https://github.com/ldc-
developers/ldc)

------
dgritsko
This 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 is something like 10,000x smaller than the
space represented by these pixels. Crazy!

~~~
ars
Analyze this photo instead:
[http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...](http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f7f7c86b-dc52-4355-a622-9e3cb9a876fc.jpg)

~~~
Jedd
While the manual for my DSLR doesn't specifically refer to this use case,
reading between the lines it sounds like using a jpg encoding for atomic-scale
image capture isn't recommended.

------
granto
View it here in actual life size on your display.
[http://beta.lifesizer.com/view?user=5&ref=_59&h=1080&w=1920](http://beta.lifesizer.com/view?user=5&ref=_59&h=1080&w=1920)

Edit: based on seeing it in actual size, I would say it would be hard to see
it with the naked eye, that said as pointed out in other comments, I suppose
not impossible if a human eye can detect a single photon.

~~~
lighttower
Thanks for the link. Very cool. What are some use cases for this service?

~~~
disposablename
Mostly dickpics

------
klickverbot
Photographer here. The amount of attention this has received has caught me a
bit off guard – this is really just a somewhat pretty picture of what is a
standard technique in physics by now.

I'm putting together a short post with answers to some of the most commonly
asked questions, but in the meantime, check out this great comment by a well-
informed Redditor:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7x4o27/p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7x4o27/picture_of_a_single_atom_wins_science_photo/du5pn7t/)

------
proxygeek
Why does the atom look so big in the bicture? Atomic radius of Strontium is
219 pm, so that small spec there in the picture should be about 438 pm across.

I'm assuming the two ball-pen nib shaped structures on both sides of the spec
in the picture are "two metal electrodes placed about 2mm (0.078in) apart".
So, the space between the left tip of the electrode and left edge of the spec
is about 1 mm. Based on some "visual calculation" (zooming in the picture and
doing some approximation), the spec seems to be closer to about 0.03 mm
across, which is orders of magnitude larger than 438 pm that it should be.
What gives?

~~~
tjohns
You're not looking directly at the atom itself (which is impossible... atoms
are smaller than light's wavelength).

You're looking at the photons emitted by an excited atom, as collected over an
extremely long exposure by the camera's sensor. Which will resolve to ~1px in
size... the smallest unit the camera can image.

~~~
SeanLuke
It doesn't appear that the atom is 1 pixel, but is in fact quite a bit larger
than this: there are lots of elements in the image which are significantly
smaller than it. So what gives?

~~~
gji
I used to work on trapped ion experiments, and the limitation of the atom size
was always the diffraction limit, which is limited by the NA of the lens
(f-stop in camera terms) and the wavelength of light. In this case, the
optical system (I'm guessing a camera lens) is designed for multiple
wavelengths, so it might not reach the diffraction limit at the emission
wavelength, which is like 400nm. In that case, the limit would be the
aberration of the camera lens, which can be wavelength-dependent. Most camera
lenses aren't designed for 400nm light, which is marginally visible.

------
ammon
This makes me think of Voyager 1's pale blue dot photograph.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blu...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png)

I find the parallel awesome.

~~~
mwest
I did wonder if it was a Sagan reference: "... I was rewarded with this
particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”

Ref:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot)

------
alborzmassah
How is this possible? For an atom to stand out, are all the atoms around the
area cleared out using electricity so it’s pure, empty space? Is that
possible? Also, as other people mentioned, I imagined atoms to be MUCH smaller
in scale than anything like what seems to be visible here.

~~~
Nec28
My guess is they made that atom very, very, very bright, among other
things...But I'm no scientist

------
VohuMana
Awesome picture!

Could someone explain to me how a DSLR camera can capture an image of a single
atop? I thought atoms were very very small, like so small only an electron
microscope could "see" them. Maybe this device has been misrepresented and it
is holding a small amount of atoms rather than a single one?

~~~
dgritsko
From the article:

> When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet color, the atom absorbs
> and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to
> capture it in a long exposure photograph.

~~~
excalibur
That explanation doesn't really satisfy. Perhaps, based on a large body of
experimental evidence, it is known that the number of atoms present can be
determined by the apparent brightness. Perhaps it's something totally
different. Regardless, it would be helpful if the author/photographer/somebody
explained the rationale that makes them confident that this is only a single
atom.

~~~
ABCLAW
Isn't hard to figure out when you've only got one ion in the trap:
[https://www.physik.hu-
berlin.de/de/nano/lehre/quantenoptik09...](https://www.physik.hu-
berlin.de/de/nano/lehre/quantenoptik09/chapter13)

Heck, you can line up ions in a row and take pictures of those if you'd like.

~~~
msla
Just because my previous comment is now gone: It's nice to mark PDFs

------
mncharity
Years ago, someone created a similar picture with a single atomic _nucleus_.
I'd like to find it again.

Normally, nuclear transitions are invisibly-high energies. X-ray and gamma.
But a couple of nuclei have multi-step spin isomer decays (or was it shape
isomer?). One step of which is visible. So someone trapped and fully stripped
a nucleus, and bombarded it to visibility. Naked-eye visibility. And took a
picture. Of vacuum vessel window, with a green(?) fluorescence dot.

I saw that picture years ago. Likely a cover photo on something.

 _I would very much like to find it again._ For use in educational content. A
lot of time has been spent looking for it, both by myself, and a couple of MIT
science librarians. If anyone has a clue, I'd very much appreciate it. Here is
a mockup[1] I gimped for user testing.

Why use it in education? To make the concept of atoms more concrete. Atomic
_electrons_ are too small (and slow and fragile) to see with your naked eye.
But (a couple of) nuclei you can (under hard-to-contrive conditions). Absent
concrete, students build their understanding of materials on muddy
misconceptions. For example, one failure-mode in teaching high-school
stoichiometry, is students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects.

And to preempt a common response... one professor complained "you aren't
really seeing the nucleus - it's only a diffraction dot"... right before they
headed out to a star party, to apparently "not see" stars. ;)

[1]
[http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/...](http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/ChamberWindow
--fake.jpg)

------
dharmon
I love what I assume is a winking "pale blue dot" reference in the quote at
the end.

~~~
vanderZwan
It's the same idea, isn't it? A single pixel with a whole lot of meaning added
to it.

------
cantrevealname
The article is about seeing a single atom; it's possible to see a single
photon too, as was previously discussed on HN:

 _People can sense single photons: Experiment suggests that humans are capable
of perceiving even the feeblest flash of light_ [1][2]

[1] [http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-
photons-1...](http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-
photons-1.20282)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163109)

------
joshdance
Is the light refracting to make the atom appear bigger than it actually is?

~~~
nikdaheratik
The laser light is absorbed by the atom and is released at a different
wavelength. While the radius of the atom is 200 x 10^-12 meters, the
wavelength of the light being emitted is in the visible spectrum, so between
380-500 x 10^-9 M which is why it is visible at the scales you can see.

A scanning electron microscope, or an x-ray crystallography based machine,
uses items with much smaller wavelengths, .01 - 10 nm in the case of x-rays
and so they're able to peer inside an atomic structure.

------
everdev
I'm imaging that the process of "magnifying" objects through photography has
to degrade the true representation of the object. Kind of like expanding 1
pixel to cover a 500x500px space. In that sense I wonder how clearly we can
ever hope to see an atom.

Obviously the technology and intent is impressive, but will we ever be able to
see an atom more clearly or is it simply too small to be seen without
Photoshopping in the details?

~~~
Tsarbomb
The internal structure of an atom is vastly different from the impression that
most science books give you with their illustrations to the point that the
question of us being able to clearly seeing an atom is almost
nonsensical/doesn't make sense.

Atoms are much more nebulous than the concept of small indivisible balls of
matter.

------
sxates
I'm curious to know how they managed to get a single atom there in the first
place. I'm assuming it's not with atomic tweezers?

~~~
amenghra
I don't know in this particular case, but in the late 80s, IBM figured out how
to move individual atoms (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_\(atoms\))).

------
sudhirj
For the folks wondering how a single atom is showing up on a DSLR CMOS, try
taking a photograph of a head of a metal pin with a very bright light shining
on it. You'll see lots of glint and reflection, and it'll look larger on the
camera - basically a single point reflecting light into multiple pixels of the
camera sensor.

------
leereeves
How do they know it's a single atom?

~~~
analog31
I followed ion and atom trapping a long time ago, when it was still fairly
new. (i.e., a couple decades ago) That was a valid question from the git-go,
and there were a number of techniques. One way is that the trap is less stable
when there are multiple atoms, so the extra atoms will eventually evaporate
away, and you can measure the diminishing intensity of the scattered laser
light. A paired atom will also interact with the light differently, for
instance having a different spectral signature.

------
cvaidya1986
This is just great. Two great photographs in such a short span. SpaceX
launching a Tesla car and landing the rockets back for reuse on the macro
level. An atom on the nano level. Evidence that humanity’s progress in the
field of physical sciences is well balanced.

------
vickychijwani
How does this not violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Unless the
explanation is that the atom moves around a lot in that tiny space, so we
haven't actually determined its exact position and momentum.

------
gigatexal
this takes the cake for great desktop backgrounds.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
For a while I used the "opposite" of a single atom for my desktop background.
Quite a few atoms in that picture! 5500 galaxies worth.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Hubble_E...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field_%28full_resolution%29.png)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-
Deep_Field#Hubble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-
Deep_Field#Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field)

------
bberrry
Gorgeous photo in so many ways. I'm unable to dig up a high-res version.
Anyone else having more luck?

~~~
abainbridge
[http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f...](http://content.assets.pressassociation.io/2018/02/11175054/f7f7c86b-dc52-4355-a622-9e3cb9a876fc.jpg)

~~~
Toast_25
Awesome, thanks! Do you know where I can find the other submissions?
Particularly "In a kitchen far far away..."? It looks astounding!

~~~
msla
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-...](https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/single-trapped-atom-
captures-science-photography-competitions-top-prize/)

~~~
Toast_25
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.

------
listentojohan
Awesome pic - and just as mind blowing. Is there a 4k version of the pic?

------
anonytrary
Are they using a Rydberg atom?

------
blackrock
Lame. This is an optical illusion. Call me when you actually image an atom at
the atomic scale.

That's what I was expecting, when I read the title description: Picture of a
Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

Like, the helical structure of DNA. I want to see how an atom looks like in
reality, on the atomic scale. Along with the protons, neutrons, and maybe the
electrons flying around it.

Zzz.. going back to sleep now..

~~~
madez
> Along with the protons, neutrons, and maybe the electrons flying around it.

That is not how reality works. Stuff is quantum mechanical and has no analog
in the macroscopic world.

All one can ever see are consequences of interactions. This is what we are
seeing.

