@@sdfkjgh Unfortunately, I think most people have never seen brain surgery and how imprecise it sometimes is: "let's scoop this out and hope for the best"
An episode on microscopes! As a materials scientist, I’m happy to see how many people are excited about this. I have used electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes and scanning tunneling microscopes before, and I can confirm they are as cool as Olivia made them sound :)
Justin Gould yes you distance from the sample is important. There are a few modes of rastering, e.g. probe maintaining constant distance (but this will cause the probe to hit especially rough samples), or maintaining constant potential, etc. The surface roughness of a sample is very important and usually the probe tips need to be replaced every few readings to maintain a sufficiently sharp tip for better image resolution.
Matt Horwich yes! 2d materials are not my field of specialty, but they are very very cool. It’s interesting how other fields of materials can be so related to seemingly unrelated things (e.g. nanomaterials for drug delivery, ceramics for stronger fibres, and futuristic applications of graphene all use the same interfacial science!)
@@jessicatjandra5815 nice! The smart materials are really exciting as well...seeing how they can be applied to the medical field, architecture and robotics, and aerospace!
I have wanted to know these things since I learned what a microscope was, and no one could ever explain it so I could understand. You just did. Thank you for answering a 30 year old question for me!
@@amarine1472 there is a ton of lay information on STM. Its been around for 40 years and has produced amazing images. I'm just saying, if you are curious about something, do a little research and most anything is on the internet. You will have satisfied that curiosity and will lead you to crave more.
I've had the chance to work with TEM's that could see the individual planes of atoms on surfaces and it's incredibly insane the how far imaging has come and the kinds of things you can see
@Private Property Maybe you could help me understand what they even are, I googled it and read a little on them. Most of what we looked at were semiconductors and nanoparticles so they were very clean to start with and wouldn't have much on them
@dontknow Not sure how serious you are but, these tools exist and have existed for quite a while now. In fact, there exists more that one method to move single atoms at a time. Such small nano-scale movements are easily achievable using piezoelectric crystals, in this case, used either for controlling the movement of the sample or the moving sensing tip by down to sub-nanometre movements when needed.
just for anyone who might read @dontknow comments. He is wrong, that was not a prank, atoms can be moved individually. Feel free to check it on google, snopes, wikipedia, etc. @dontknow is either delusional. or a troll.
@dontknow the internet is filled with evidence that IBM is not lying about "a boy and his atom". I am not going to fall for a troll. Anyone can google scholar "a boy and his atom". You are the one who needs to bring evidence that is contrary to current scientific agreement.
Remember IBM's movie A Boy and His Atom? Amazing how far we have pushed this mammal brain of ours, from being on trees and banging rocks, to landing on the moon and being able to see individual atoms, just amazing. And then, we have the flat earthers and other science deniers *sigh*
A "screw within a screw" gets you a micrometer... so scale that up as far as it takes to gain another 10,000 orders of magnitude to get down to angstroms.
Piezoelectric actuators. By applying a large voltage across certain materials/crystals, you can get them to expand by very small amounts. The biggest issue with this is that they have a nonlinear response, meaning that you apply 100V, it might move 10 nm, but if you apply 150V it might move 20 nm. To account for this a feedback loop is used, in this case it is usually based on the tip-sample current, and for the x an y they use linear variable differential transformers which can measure very small distances for the feedback loop. Source: Im a condensed matter physicist who uses atomic force microscopes and scanning tunnelling microscopes almost daily.
@@miskers12 Thank you for that great explanation. I'm a mechanical engineer so I was skeptical it could be done mechanically in any way at all. The piezoelectric actuators make a lot more sense. They have very limited range, but if you are measuring atoms, I suppose they have a massive range.
About electrons having a "certain probability of being somewhere at a given time" - This will sound familiar if you have ever tried to get a drummer to show up for a gig.
Me: Holy cow! I'm going to see what a friggin' ATOM looks like under a microscope!! SciShow: Here's a picture of some yellow stripes with a honeycomb-looking pattern.
I only recently learned about STMs in my microbiology class. I literally gasped when my professor showed an image of a piece of DNA with helicase and polymerase working to replicate it.
IBM has a video showing off this cool technology in a video called "A Boy and His Atom: The Worlds Smallest Movie". As far as I am aware, they used the microscope to pick up and move individual atoms to make a short stop motion animation. You can even see the EM waves picked up from high concentrations of atoms! Here's a link to the video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oSCX78-8-q0.html
Three years. These scientists took on a task that had been considered impossible just a couple decades prior, using several different complicated results in high-level branches of science to achieve it. And it took them only 3 years.
Scientific journalism like this is incredibly difficult and amazing. You guys take a hell of a chance by stepping into these fields and condense the information so practically.
I am still amazed how they handle vibration ..I have worked on vibration removal on ultramicro weighing machine even a footstep 10 meter away vibrate the reading here they are talking about an atom tick!!
Ok, this perfectly explains why I belive what scientists tell me... because they make stuff that actually work! And reveal new things nobody had any idea about before.
So two corrections. 1) The vast majority of electron microscopes use back scattered electrons not transmission electrons to image. 2) The team at IBM used an atomic force microscope AFM not an STM to manipulate their gold atoms.
You are more interested in the timing between two sentences than a telescope that can see atom… You have an exceptional ability to notice extremely small details… perhaps it would be much better to use that ability on something more useful than the timing between sentences…
@@tonamg53 That was a constructive feedback and not some trolling or personal attack. If you can't handle that then I wish you good luck. Have a nice day.
Cool topic, but the editing on this video is really weird. It sounds like every sentence was recorded separately and then glued together. Very distracting. 🤷♀️
Excellent presentation. It hard to believe humanity has found a way to see something that small. Next we need to develop a device that can hear the atom.
I helped build an AFM from plans as a PHD project back in the 1990s. Was painstaking work, to be sure, but very satisfying when we started getting the first results.
This is how research groups who are lead by Advisors who aren't good at grant writing collect data. Those that are use the super awesome stuff that people like me wish we had. We wrote a grant one time trying to get the money to purchase a new Conductive Probe AFM which had a TUNA system which was for interrogating surfaces with ultra low currents, at least at that time they were, in the femtoamp range. We used 10 picoamps as a tunneling current when scanning with the STM because we were scanning over a conductive self assembled monolayer and that current range was calculated at the time to be just outside of the monolayer. I would quite literally run an STM all day for free. I really enjoyed the research part of grad school.
Quantum tunnelling is not electrons jumping from one place to another. Quantum tunnelling occurs when _any subatomic particle_ escapes through a barrier (whereas in classical mechanics this process would be impossible).
Great episode! I just realized I've never actually seen a picture of an electron microscope. I've seen images produced by them of course but nobody ever shows the microscope. And I never thought to look it up
This is amazing and so cool! They knew how to keep something from being disturbed by small vibrations years before L.I.G.O. was built. Good to know. The precision is incredible!
4:39 seems like the magnetic coupling would still introduce any vibrations from one to the other unless the outer magnets are essentially noise-cancelling electromagnets which I doubt they were at that time period, so, they still had noise in their experiments despite the levitation gimmick.
I was a little confused about that as well. The most common way of fine vibration isolation for these things is to use eddy current damping, involving hanging the system on springs, right above some magnets. You float them over magnets, but you don't float them using magnets.
The initial idea was to use the levitated object's inertia to dampen it's movement, in much the same way a car moving quickly over a bumpy road gives a smoother ride than one driving slowly as it doesn't have time to respond to every pothole. The apparatus will lag behind he magnet's vibrations and when designed correctly the most troublesome vibrations can be heavily dampened.
I recall when those first atoms were imaged and when IBM first spelled their name in atoms (nickel?), but I never did look up how the technology worked. Fascinating!
