2023-06-04 22:29:00
A US research team has succeeded in imaging an atom with X-rays for the first time.
Professor So-Wai Hla of Physics at Ohio University and Dr. Volker Rose’s research team at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) published in the scientific journal ‘Nature’ that, unlike so far, which required more than 10,000 atoms to X-ray a material, iron (Fe) It was revealed that one atom and one terbium (Tb) atom were photographed in X-rays.
Professor Hla said, “It has been a long-held dream of scientists to take an X-ray image of an atom, and now that dream is coming true. “We can now trace properties to the limit of a single constituent atom.”
| ▲ Explanation of X-ray imaging of a molecule with one iron atom in the center. Shining X-rays (blue) onto an iron atom (the red ball in the center of the molecule) excites core-level electrons. Excited electrons provide information on iron atoms through overlapping atomic and molecular orbitals and through the detector probe (grey). |
“This groundbreaking achievement will revolutionize the way scientists analyze materials,” he added, adding that it would have a major impact on environmental science and medicine and contribute to the development of new treatments for various diseases.
Discovered by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, X-rays are used for a variety of purposes, from health checkups to airport security screenings. there is.
In science, X-rays have played an important role in identifying substances contained in samples. However, the X-ray signal generated by the atom to be analyzed is very weak, making it difficult to photograph a single atom with a conventional X-ray detector. The recent development of X-rays using the synchrotron, an electron/ion accelerator, has greatly reduced the amount of samples required for imaging, but the smallest amount that can be imaged with X-rays has been at the level of an attogram (10 -18 square g) of more than 10,000 atoms.
The research team used specially designed synchrotron X-rays at the XTIP beamline of the Center for Advanced Photon Sources and Nanomaterials at the Argonne National Laboratory to discover molecules composed of one iron atom and six ruthenium (Ru) atoms and three brominated pyridine-2,6-dicars. A terbium compound surrounded by bosamid was photographed and analyzed.
To detect the X-ray signal from one atom, they created a synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscope (SX-STM), which was placed very close to the sample by attaching a special detector made of a sharp metal needle to the existing X-ray detector.
The X-ray spectrometer of SX-STM can directly and effectively identify single atoms in a sample by absorbing the light of core electrons that are strongly bound to the nuclei of individual atoms.
Professor Hla said, “As a result of comparing the chemical state of the iron atom and the terbium atom in each molecule, the terbium atom, a rare earth metal, is somewhat isolated from the surrounding atoms, so the chemical state does not change, while the iron atom interacts strongly with the surrounding atoms. showed up,” he explained.
Researcher Tolurov Michael Azai (doctoral student), first author of the paper, said, “The technology and proven concepts used in this study will revolutionize X-ray science and nanoscale research.” He said that it could also lead to the birth of new technologies in fields such as trace element detection.
Science Team [email protected]
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