Molecular imaging for fun and profit.
Big Blue boffins have come up with a way of taking snaps of the chemical structure of an individual molecule.
The achievement means that it's getting closer to building computing elements at the atomic scale.
These will of course be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than all previous generations of processors and memory chips.
IBM has been trying to work out a way of taking pictures of individual atoms within a molecule since 1945.
Scientists In Zurich, Switzerland, have, for the first time, imaged the "anatomy", or chemical structure, of an individual molecule with "unprecedented" resolution, using noncontact atomic force microscopy (AFM).
This is basically an atomically sharp metal tip terminated with a carbon monoxide molecule.
IBM said that the atomic force microscopy was done in an ultrahigh vacuum and at very low temperatures (5 Kelvin equals minus 268 degrees Centigrade or minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit).
This is about the same temperature as a British beach in summer and means that scientists could "to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time."
The first picture was probably of the atom sticking two electrons behind the nucleus of another atom and smirking.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012