Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last

Thanks to specialised microscopes, we have long been able to see the beauty of single atoms. But strange though it might seem, imaging larger molecules at the same level of detail has not been possible – atoms are robust enough to withstand existing tools, but the structures of molecules are not. Now researchers at IBM have come up with a way to do it. The earliest pictures of individual atoms were captured in the 1970s by blasting a target – typically a chunk of metal – with a beam of electrons, a technique known as transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Later refinements of this technique, such as the TEAM project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California achieved resolutions of less than the radius of a single hydrogen atom. More>