Physicists
just put Apple’s latest iPhone to shame, taking the most detailed image of atoms to date with a device that magnifies images 100 million times, Scientific
American reports. The researchers, who set the record for the highest
resolution microscope in 2018, outdid themselves with a study published last
month.
Using a
method called electron ptychography, in which a beam of electrons is shot at an
object and bounced off to create a scan that algorithms use to reverse engineer
the above image, were used to visualize the sample. Previously, scientists
could only use this method to image objects that were a few atoms thick.
But the new
study lays out a technique that can image samples 30 to 50 nanometers wide—a
more than 10-fold increase in resolution, they report in Science. The
breakthrough could help develop more efficient electronics and batteries, a
process that requires visualizing components on the atomic level.