Experts managed to make the atom visible to humans

2018-02-24 07:14

Experts managed to make the atom visible to humans
Scientists have made a single atom visible to the naked human eye.

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The winner of the competition of scientific photographs held in the UK by the EPSRC Council in a picture taken by David Nagongera, Professor of physics at the University of Oxford. But the main object of this picture, which is called “Single Atom in an Ion Trap”, there is only one atom, which thanks to some techniques can be seen with the naked eye, reports Rus.Media.

“The idea is to make a single atom visible to the human eye held me for a long time,” says Professor Nallinger, “And what I managed to achieve is a sort of bridge between the tiny quantum world and our macroscopic reality.”

In order to give an idea of the scale of what you see, it should be noted that the distance between two metal electrodes, between which is arranged an ion trap, is just two millimeters. However, this is the scale that we can “touch and see” in contrast to the size of the atom, which is calculated by fractions of a nanometer.

In order to make the visible atom, strontium atom was ionized using laser light and captured within the ion trap inside the chamber, which maintained a deep vacuum. Trapped ion was illuminated with light violet-blue laser, which formed a kind of potential well in the space, sandwiched between four yoke