A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and others, led by OHIO professor Saw Wai Hla, have taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL of just one atom.
My PhD research is actually on characterizing chemistry at the atomic scale, and it is hard to do! I’m using an electron signal rather than an x-ray signal, but still. It would be hard to overstate what an incredible technical accomplishment this is.
Of course harder problems remain: this atom was relatively isolated, and it will be much harder to get chemical signatures from single atoms embedded in, say, a crystal, but it’s great progress. (We actually can get single-atom chemical information from atoms in a crystal, using a technique called atom-probe tomography. The catch is that it’s a destructive analysis method, and I hear it’s also a pretty tricky technique to perform.)
This is amazing.
My PhD research is actually on characterizing chemistry at the atomic scale, and it is hard to do! I’m using an electron signal rather than an x-ray signal, but still. It would be hard to overstate what an incredible technical accomplishment this is.
Of course harder problems remain: this atom was relatively isolated, and it will be much harder to get chemical signatures from single atoms embedded in, say, a crystal, but it’s great progress. (We actually can get single-atom chemical information from atoms in a crystal, using a technique called atom-probe tomography. The catch is that it’s a destructive analysis method, and I hear it’s also a pretty tricky technique to perform.)