Winner of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) science photography contest has been awarded to David Nadlinger of the University of Oxford.
Amazingly, David has managed to take an image of a single atom. Specifically, a strontium atom.
The photograph was accomplished by trapping the strontium atom in electric fields produced by metal electrodes. The long exposure was taken through an ultra-high vacuum chamber window with a laser used to light up the atom.
David Nadlinger says, “The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the minuscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality. A back-of-the-envelope calculation showed the numbers to be on my side, and when I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon, I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”
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