Science!
Single Molecule's Stunning Image
A team at IBM Zurich have managed to refine an atomic force microscope to the point where it can actually see the chemical bonds inside a molecule, like so:
The molecule in question is pentacene, which looks like this:
(I've added the hydrogens back in. For those who've forgotten everything they ever knew about drawing molecules, the unlabelled vertices are carbon atoms)
Not only can you see the bonds between the carbon atoms, you can also see at least a hint of the bonds to the hydrogens. What I don't know, since they chose an aromatic molecule (for good reason -- pentacene is flat), is whether you could tell the difference between double and single bonds -- in pentacene, the bond strength is distributed across all the bonds. But it's still incredibly impressive.
Next up, they're apparently trying to combine it with STM to show both the bonds and what each atom is. I would so love to see that available as desktop technology...
A team at IBM Zurich have managed to refine an atomic force microscope to the point where it can actually see the chemical bonds inside a molecule, like so:
The molecule in question is pentacene, which looks like this:
(I've added the hydrogens back in. For those who've forgotten everything they ever knew about drawing molecules, the unlabelled vertices are carbon atoms)
Not only can you see the bonds between the carbon atoms, you can also see at least a hint of the bonds to the hydrogens. What I don't know, since they chose an aromatic molecule (for good reason -- pentacene is flat), is whether you could tell the difference between double and single bonds -- in pentacene, the bond strength is distributed across all the bonds. But it's still incredibly impressive.
Next up, they're apparently trying to combine it with STM to show both the bonds and what each atom is. I would so love to see that available as desktop technology...