Scientists managed to capture the image of one atom

The British Council for Research in Engineering and Physical Sciences has announced the results of the photography competition. The championship in the competition was won by a photo of the strontium atom, which was held in space by means of electric fields.

Photo by David Nadlinger, a physicist from the University of Oxford. The photograph was the result of painstaking work of the researcher: to obtain it, he needed to hold a positively charged particle between a pair of metal needles placed at a distance of two millimeters. The particle itself was illuminated by a blue-violet laser, which caused it to emit photons, which were captured through a long exposure. To make the atom static, the structure was placed in a vacuum at a low temperature. Nadlinger himself notes that the idea of ​​seeing a particle with the naked eye has become a kind of bridge between the microscopic quantum world and macroscopic reality.

This technology for obtaining a picture with a strontium atom opens up opportunities for researching the quantum world and paves the way for quantum computers. You can view the works of the remaining contenders for victory on the council's Internet portal.