{"id":223815,"date":"2025-10-23T04:18:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/a-seating-chart-for-atoms-helps-locate-their-positions-in-materials"},"modified":"2025-10-23T04:18:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:18:36","slug":"a-seating-chart-for-atoms-helps-locate-their-positions-in-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/a-seating-chart-for-atoms-helps-locate-their-positions-in-materials","title":{"rendered":"A \u2018seating chart\u2019 for atoms helps locate their positions in materials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-seating-chart-for-atoms-helps-locate-their-positions-in-materials.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light\u2014which is a thousand times larger than the atom\u2019s width\u2014is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf an atom, missing it entirely as it passes by. This gulf in size has long made it impossible for scientists to see and resolve individual atoms using optical microscopes alone.<\/p>\n<p>Only recently have scientists found ways to break this \u201cdiffraction limit,\u201d to see features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. With new techniques known as <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/super-resolution+microscopy\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">super-resolution microscopy<\/a>, scientists can see down to the scale of a single molecule.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, individual atoms have still been too small for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/optical+microscopes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">optical microscopes <\/a>\u2014which are much simpler and less expensive than super-resolution techniques\u2014to distinguish, until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light\u2014which is a thousand times larger than the atom\u2019s width\u2014is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf an atom, missing it entirely as it passes by. This gulf in size has long made it impossible [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}