Have you ever felt atoms? We are made up of atoms. Whether in our own bodies or in all aspects of the material world, we are always in contact with atoms. But we can't feel them ourselves. Even if you put your palm on the table, you don't actually feel the atoms-what you feel is the repulsive force of the electrostatic field generated by the electrons rotating around each atom at a speed close to the speed of light. They produce a negative charge, which prevents other atoms that are also negatively charged from getting too close. At this level of detail, the whole "hard" surface world has become similar to an unimaginable number of tiny unipolar magnets trying to stick themselves together.
For the first time, scientists really tried to "feel" matter on the atomic scale, which opened the door. In 198 1 year, Gerd Binning and Heinrich Laurel, researchers working for IBM Zurich, developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Based on a basic effect of quantum mechanics, STM places a very sharp needle tip very close to the detected material. When a charge is obtained, electrons "jump off" the probe tip and "tunnel" the material. This tunneling mode-where and when electrons jump from the tip to the material-provides you with an image of the material, just as it is penetrated by X-rays. Although atoms can't be closely connected, Buennig and Basil used quantum tunnels to make them eat grass so gently-this research won them the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics.
1985, Binnig continued to make the first real improvement on STM-"Atomic Force Microscope" (AFM), adding a micromechanical vibrator at the tip of the probe. When the AFM tip vibrates back and forth, it scans the material area on the atomic scale. This tip is only one millionth of a meter long, so it can not only "read" the material under it, but also (with a proper charge) can even be used to push the material and gently push a single atom to a new position. In order to show their newly discovered ability, IBM released a famous photo in 1989, in which a group of xenon atoms were arranged in the logo of IBM. This is not an easy task-the quantum effect that allows electrons to enter the material from the tip tunnel also makes it very easy for these atoms to "walk out" of the AFM-induced position.
Atomic force microscope makes it possible to "read" and "write" atoms, but a very clever graduate student at the University of North Carolina in the United States came up with a way to touch atoms. Russell M. Taylor entered the information generated by atomic force microscope into a graphic supercomputer worth millions of dollars. These data are used to generate a three-dimensional "profile" of the material under the probe tip. Although the image generated by AFM scanning roughly describes the "shape" of atoms, Taylor's visualization provides a sense of depth, position and direction-not only an atom, but also the chemically related structure of atoms (molecules) relative to atoms. These atoms and molecules are projected onto a table-sized surface, and when viewed with special 3D glasses, they look as real as apples and oranges.
Taylor added the last touch to his research equipment-his VR system has a tactile interface; In other words, it can provide a false "touch" for the objects displayed in the desktop virtual world. You can (virtually) run your hand across the surface of atoms, or even push them around and feel them return to their original positions. As Taylor named it, this nano-manipulator became one of the landmark works in the first virtual reality era. They shared his work with some research chemists. To their surprise, they can "feel" through chemical bonds and molecular structures that have always been abstract in theory, and find that they never know these substances, because their sense of touch reveals intuitive details that no one even thought of. Nanomanipulators involve many senses, which makes the atomic scale tangible and provides chemists with an incredible tool to think about their work.
Nano-manipulators make atomic scales tangible.
But the nano-manipulator is very big, expensive and exquisite. STM and AFM need a certain degree of precision and support, so they are put into the rarest laboratory suite-if you want to try, you need a supercomputer with more than 1 10,000 dollars to convert them into nano manipulators. Taylor has carefully designed a unique breakthrough tool. Even preparing samples for AFM scanning requires a lot of work; The experimental objects of atomic force microscope and scanning tunneling microscope must be placed in an isolated vacuum chamber, which immediately excludes the observation of any distant creature at atomic scale.
Christopher Bolton, a researcher, made an unexpected discovery in a laboratory at the University of Melbourne, which opened a less toxic window for the nano-scale. In his work on lasers, Bolton saw something he had never seen or heard of before-illuminating microscopic things from multiple angles, resulting in multiple views of the same object. Bolton can summarize these images into a single view of a very small thing from a very simple mathematical point of view.
How small is it? The optical microscope reached the physical limit of half a micron (micron is one millionth of a meter)-because things were too small at that time, smaller than the wavelength of light. Bolton found that by using his method of shooting objects from all angles with light beams, he could only take images of objects one twentieth the size-only 25 nanometers (billionth of a meter).
This technology can be used for almost any sample you want to put on a microscope slide-no vacuum is needed. Bolton reported: "We put a living bacterium on a glass slide and watched it struggle. Bolton's discovery that he became a start-up company with research consultant Ray Dagastine seems to provide medicine and biology with the observation foundation they need to understand bacteria, viruses and the deep but little-known interaction between our bodies and the environment.
400 years ago, the first microscope gave us a window to a world we never imagined. These latest microscopes have opened up new prospects for the world we know theoretically but have never visited in practice. How much will we learn when we see the dance of nano-creatures? Maybe it won't be long before some enterprising graduate students tap the tactile interface on this new microscope, so that we can touch the surface of the virus, feel its spikes, and perhaps learn how to protect ourselves from these proteins better?