{"id":23,"date":"2008-07-10T14:17:57","date_gmt":"2008-07-10T19:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/2008\/07\/10\/our-highest-resolution-microscope-image-ever\/"},"modified":"2008-09-02T11:43:56","modified_gmt":"2008-09-02T16:43:56","slug":"our-highest-resolution-microscope-image-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/2008\/07\/10\/our-highest-resolution-microscope-image-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Yee-ouch, them pins is pointy!  (Our highest resolution microscope image ever)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last few months, we&#8217;ve been collaborating with <a href=\"http:\/\/chemistry.richmond.edu\/faculty\/Leopold_Michael.html\">Mike Leopold <\/a>and his students in the chemistry department to use our <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atomic_force_microscopy\">atomic force microscope <\/a>to image their nanoparticle films.\u00a0 We just purchased a small number of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanoworld.com\/print\/C-04.html\">extra sharp (and extra expensive) tips <\/a>for the microscope that allow us to resolve surface features about 1 nanometer in size.\u00a0 This image of a thin gold film that was coated over a mica surface is our first picture with the new tips.\u00a0 The mica is mostly very smooth, except for the big crevasse in the lower right hand corner.\u00a0 The surface roughness that you see is from the gold film, which clumps together to form small &#8220;grains&#8221; about 20-30 atoms across, or about\u00a010 nanometers.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/files\/2008\/07\/baregold-0008.png\" title=\"baregold-0008.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/files\/2008\/07\/baregold-0008.png\" alt=\"baregold-0008.png\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Take a moment to appreciate the scale of this picture.\u00a0 The vertical scale at the right shows that the darkest areas are about 5 nanometers lower than the whitest areas; most of the surface roughness is on the order of about two nanometers.\u00a0 The entire image is 500 nanometers\u00a0across, or half a micron.\u00a0 If it shows up on your computer screen as 4 inches across,\u00a0then the width of\u00a0a human hair on the same scale would be about fifty feet!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This image was taken by my student, Nate Lawrence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last few months, we&#8217;ve been collaborating with Mike Leopold and his students in the chemistry department to use our atomic force microscope to image their nanoparticle films.\u00a0 We just purchased a small number of extra sharp (and extra expensive) tips for the microscope that allow us to resolve surface features about 1 nanometer &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/2008\/07\/10\/our-highest-resolution-microscope-image-ever\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Yee-ouch, them pins is pointy!  (Our highest resolution microscope image ever)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[508],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicstrawick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}