See that sweetness to the right? It's an actual image of the precise structure of a bridge of atoms that links two gold crystals. It was captured by one of the world's most powerful transmission electron microscopes, called TEAM 0.5 for short, and it was installed yesterday at the University of California-Berkeley.
TEAM can deliver crisp, clear, color-rich images of objects less than half the diameter of a hydrogen atom (that's half a ten-billionth of a meter). It can produce such high-quality images because the beam of energy sent down the column is bolstered by brand new error-correcting technology that allows the user to adjust focus atom by atom. This effectively cuts down on the image noise generally associated with electron microscopes.
(Check out a pic of TEAM after the jump)
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