Photographed: The Glow from a Single, Hovering Strontium Atom

The award-winning photo. (Credit: David Nadlinger)

In the photo above, you’re looking at a single, positively charged strontium atom suspended by electric fields.

It’s an atom, visible to the naked eye.

Whoa, right?

David Nadlinger, a quantum physicist and PhD candidate at Oxford University, is the person who put it all together. He titled his picture “Single Atom in an Ion Trap.” A blue-violet laser blasts the atom, which then absorbs and re-emits enough light particles to be photographed with conventional equipment. So, technically, you’re seeing light emitted from an atom and not the atom itself. Two metal electrodes generate electric fields that hold the atom nearly motionless. For perspective, the space between the two metal forks is roughly 2 millimeters.

The photograph was worthy of the grand prize in a national photo contest organized by the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Nadlinger captured the image using a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens, extension tubes and two flash units with color gels. 

Read more: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/02/14/photograph-single-atom/?utm_source=dsctwitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dsctwitter