HEADING 8
A SINGLE STRONTIUM ATOM FLOATS BETWEEN TWO ELECTRODES.
Look closely and you'll see it: a
pale, purple pixel hanging in a
black field between two
cylindrical needles. What looks
like a shimmering speck of
dust is actually something
much, much smaller: a single
atom of strontium, isolated in
an ion-trap machine at the
University of Oxford.
How do you capture a
photo of something
this seemingly
infinitesimally small?
One photographer,
David Nadlinger, used
a standard digital
camera — but he had
some help setting up
the shot courtesy of
Oxford's Ion Trap
Quantum Computing lab,
where he is researching for
his Ph.D. On Feb. 12,
Nadlinger won first place in
a
national
science
photography
competition
organized
by
the
Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council
for capturing this rare photo
of a single illuminated atom.
That's small. Really small.
Each atom is roughly 0.25
nanometers (or billionths of a
meter) across; billions of the
atoms would fit comfort ably
inside a single red blood cell.
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