Taking snapshots of atomic motion using electrons

Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven – the Netherlands

Abstract

55 years after Richard Feynman’s famous Caltech lecture ‘There is plenty of room at the bottom’ [1], heralding the age of nano science and technology, many of the possibilities he envisaged have come true: Using electron microscopy it is nowadays possible to resolve and even identify individual atoms; STM and AFM not only provide us with similar spatial resolution on surfaces, but also allow dragging individual atoms around in a controlled way; X-ray diffraction has revealed the complicated structures of thousands of proteins, giving invaluable insight into the machinery of life.