At the University of Oxford, a PHD student David Nadlinger is being celebrated in the world of science photography for being the first person ever to capture a single, floating atom with an ordinary camera.
Using long exposure, the Oxford student took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate setup of laboratory machinery.
In the picture the single strontium atom is illuminated by a laser while held in the air by two electrodes. For a sense of scale, those two electrodes on each side of the tiny dot are only two millimetres apart.
The image won first prize in a science photo contest conducted by UK-based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
In the contest EPSRC explained how the single atom is visible to a normal camera:
The atom is illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet colour, causing the atom to absorb and re-emit the light particles quick enough for a normal camera to capture it in a long exposure photograph.
Nadlinger is quoted as saying “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 miniscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality.
When I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon,” he said, “I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”
See image below:
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