Seeing Gold Atoms

The TEAM in The TEAM Project stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-Correction Microscope. They're a group trying to built the world's most powerful microscope. "With the TEAM microscope it will become possible to study how atoms combine to form materials, how materials grow and how they respond to a variety of external factors. These constitute many of the most practical things that we need to know about materials and will improve designs for everything from better, lighter, more efficient automobiles, to stronger buildings and new ways of harvesting energy."

The big new thing is the aberration-correction, much as it is in telescope images. "It's because the signal-to-noise ratio is so good that you can adjust focus atom by atom, with enough sensitivity to obtain information about the three-dimensional atomic structure of a single nanoparticle." Dahmen adds, "This brings us within reach of meeting the great challenge posed by the famous physicist Richard Feynman in 1959: the ability to analyze any chemical substance simply by looking to see where the atoms are."

The project is supposed to be completed next year, but they just recently announced that it's now working (not done but working). Here's a picture of two gold crystals meeting. The little dots you see are individual gold atoms, 2.3 angstroms apart, that's 23 billionths of a meter.