Scientists have identified the 3D coordinates of 6,569 iron and 16,627 platinum atoms in an
iron-platinum nanoparticle.
Credit: Colin Ophus and Florian Nickel
For the first time, scientists have seen the exact locations of more than 23,000 atoms in a particle that's small enough to fit inside the wall of a single cell.
A team led by Peter Ercius of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Jianwei Miao of UCLA used a scanning electron microscope to examine a particle that was made of iron (Fe) and platinum (Pt) that was only 8.4 nanometers across, they reported yesterday (Feb. 1) in the journal Nature. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or 3.9 one-hundred-millionths of an inch.)
Why would anyone care about the location of each little atom? "At the nanoscale, every atom counts," Michael Farle, a physicist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, wrote in an accompanying News and Views article in Nature. "For example, changing the relative positions of a few Fe and Pt atoms in a FePt nanoparticle dramatically alters the particle's properties, such as its response to a magnetic field." [Images: Tiny Life Revealed in Stunning Microscope Photos] https://www.livescience.com/57748-physicists-see-single-atoms-in-nanoparticle.html
