Electrodes two millimetres apart trap a single atom David Nadlinger – University of Oxford
An image of a single atom of the metal strontium suspended in electric fields has won the .
‘s photo, Single Atom In An Ion Trap, was captured through the window of a vacuum chamber in an Oxford University laboratory, using an ordinary digital camera on a long exposure shot.
Two metal electrodes, two millimetres apart, held the strontium almost motionless in a strong electric field as it was illuminated with a blue-violet-coloured laser.
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“The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the minuscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality,” Nadlinger said.
“When I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon, I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot,” he said.
The tiny, blue dot is an illuminated strontium atom David Nadlinger – University of Oxford
Strontium atoms are relatively large, with radii around 215 billionths of a millimetre. The atom is visible in this photograph because it absorbs and re-emits the bright light of the laser.
Extremely still strontium atoms like this one are used in atomic clocks. Each tick of one of these hyper-precise clocks is determined by the frequency of radiation emitted when electrons around an atom change energy states.
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