Atoms

Warning! It is technically impossible to take pictures of atoms in a very good representation. These photos show the "presence" of atoms but the representation is not real, it's like a reflection. To be more easy to understand, take an another example: it's like the difference between the first X-ray in 1895 and 3D-radiography in 2021... So there is still a lot of progress to be made in this area...and I don't have a scanning tunnelling microscope or access to Annular dark-field imaging!

Bibliophile, I developed a collection of 1st editions in particle physics/wave/light. For the photographs, I was inspired by the work of Dennis Gabor (Nobel Prize, father of the Holography and researcher in the field of the electron microscope)... and I built my own material in Optics...

Aluminium - March 2019My own work.

Aluminium - July 2021
My own work. Other tests in progress.

versus Aluminium with High-resolution STEM-HAADF micrograph (Annular dark-field imaging). Credit photo Wikipedia (user: Matheustunes).

Another example to understand: it's like these two photographs which represent neurons with two different techniques (handmade microscope versus laboratory microscope). It's the same for atoms, we don't yet have the technique to take them in high-resolution photography. We suspect their shape but we don't have all the details.

To return to atoms and the subatomic world, gradually I will test different techniques to see what is clearer, but it will never be perfect.

Stay turned ;-)

Zinc 1

Atomic Mass = 65.4 g/mol

Copper 1

Atomic Mass = 63.5 g/mol

Iron 1

Atomic Mass = 55.8 g/mol

Aluminum 1

Atomic Mass = 27.0 g/mol

I used a mole set (zinc, copper, iron and aluminium) and an Ultraviolet lamp in addition of my material. I need to think about how make better photography at this scale; I had to rework the color and the light in some photos. We can see than zinc is more dense than aluminium for example. Each sample of zinc, copper, iron and aluminium contains 6.02 x 1023 atoms.

My dream? Do that kind of stop-motion: IBM researchers make world's smallest movie using atoms.

Zinc 2

Copper 2

Iron 2

Aluminum 2

We have a bad representation of the atom when we think of the planetary mini-system as described by Bohr.
In fact, the atom is more like a kind of spherical "cloud" or as Dennis Gabor described like a "spherical aberration".

Zinc 3

Copper 3

Iron 3

Aluminum 3

Aluminum 4
(new lab/7/25/2021)

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