Some cool images from my research group:
1. Scanning Electron Micrograph of “Silver flowers” grown by the precipitation of silver solids onto an interdigitated electrode
2.Transmission Electron Micrograph phase contrast image of a Palladium nanoparticle, showing the crystal structure.
I took this one. The nanoparticle is the shadowy blog with the little dot-like pattern. Some have said it looks like a golf ball. This particular nanoparticle has approximately 147 give or take 10 atoms. It is a real bitch to image stuff this small because the contrast is poor. The magnification on this image was 850000x (the first image had a mag of 485x)! So here’s your science lesson: it’s improper to say that we are actually “seeing” the atoms. The image of the atoms in the crystal lattice is formed from the interference of electron waveforms as the electron beam passes through the nanoparticle. as the electrons pass by the atom collumns, those electrons closer to the atomic cores become phase advanced and in turn become out of phase and interphere with the other electrons in this beam, and the interference pattern in the wavefront that emerges below the nanoparticle itself is focused in the objective lense and imaged. Cool, huh. What? You didn’t understand of word of that? No prob. It’s analogous to the rippled patern formed downstream in a riverbed from the water having passed over a bunch of rocks.
Hmmm…phase shifting atoms one at a time. Think we’ll develop a way to phase-shift an entire person into subspace any time soon?
Uber cool.
Is it as fun as it sounds?
Yeah, I pretty much follow. I want to know what happens when a couple pounds of nanopalladium gets pumped up with deuterium.
Linked at Photon Courier.
ood post.
James
Hmm…is it as fun as it sounds? Sometimes. In a way. It involves a lot of eye-squinting and repetitive actions. I would call it very gratifying to get images like this one, but like most of chemistry grad school, it’s 1% glee, 99% scut work.