Atom’s shadow photographed for the first time

Daily Mail : Scientists at Australia’s Griffith University have succeeded in photographing the shadow of a single atom. To capture the image, they used electrostatic forces to hold an ytterbium atom still within a chamber, exposed it to a specific frequency of light, and then took a picture with a digital camera of the shadow it cast on a detector. The technique is extremely precise: “If we change the frequency of the light we shine on the atom by just one part in a billion, the image can no longer be seen,” said Dave Kielpinski, chief investigator at Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics. The biomicroscopy technique could have many uses, including examination of very small and fragile biological samples such as DNA strands, where overexposure to UV light or x rays could harm the material, writes Rob Waugh for the Daily Mail.