Amazing photo shows individual Atoms

When I studied physics, I only had a crude concept of what an atom might look like, and very little idea of what an object made of atoms would look like at high magnification.

Nowadays, things are very different. This image of a sharp tungsten needle was taken with a field ion microscope and shows what individual atoms look like when assembled into a structure. You can even see areas where the atoms moved during the image capture!

Comments

[Christopher St. John]

I get how scanning probe microscopes can image individual atom by moving a very sharp needle across a surface, but I had no clue how a field ion microscope worked. Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_ion_microscope

While the image is very pretty, the raw cleverness that went into designing the field ion technique really boggles.