Atoms Receive 'Movie Star' Treatment

Roland Piquepaille writes "A news release from the University of Toronto (U of T) says that a team of chemists has successfully captured images of atoms during the melting of aluminum. "Chemists at the University of Toronto have captured atom-scale images of the melting process-revealing the first images of the transition of a solid into a liquid at the timescale of femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second. The result is an unprecedented "movie" detailing the melting process as solid aluminum becomes a liquid." Can this be useful for you? Probably not. But these chemists think they have a new valuable tool which will allow them to make atomic movies of other chemical reactions. This summary contains more details and additional references."

Re:How Long

[Molina the Bofh]

You just think of pirating movies.

Do you want these poor atoms starving to death because they don't get paid for their melting work, you insensitive clod ?

Bastard.

Worthless

[GoRK]

This thread is worthess without pics.

Seriously, this is cool, but the whole thing is about photos that don't seem to be available anywhere yet except in the magazine.

Re:Worthless

[Tukla]

This thread is worthess without pics.

I just mentally added "you insensitive clod!" to your statement. Quite involuntarily, I might point out.

Please kill me.

Re:Worthless

[GoRK]

Haha! I have never said 'you insensitive clod!' in a post that I remember.. The "This thread is worthess..." is a holdover from the auto forum sites where it is used fairly often...

See here [bimmerforums.com] for a little example...

Can I See ... ?

[agent oranje]

So, where are these movies? Maybe a still-image sequence...?

Although I'm impressed that this team managed to do this, I'd kinda like to see it. A text-description of this process leaves me feeling all shades of empty inside. Gimmie gimmie gimmie.

Re:Can I See ... ?

[ed333]

Truly, I felt dissapointed by this article. I, for one, would love to have watched the aluminum atoms scream in fear as they hurl themselves from their crystalline structure into a molten soup before the awesome power of the Death Laser!

Who's starring again? :)

Re:Can I See ... ?

[jjhlk]

Head to your nearest place of higher learning. You should be able to pick up the latest Science magazine, which might have the pictures (I'm going to take a look myself on Monday).

Re:Can I See ... ?

[dnahelix]

you mean CAN'T be seen.

One has to wonder

[Zerth]

Will the aluminum atoms be cancelling their appearance on Letterman?

Hope they weren't underage... What is the age of consent for aluminum, anyway?

Oh, there are pictures

[Laplace]

You just can't see them. They're tiny. The size of atoms.

Pictures

[bottlerocket]

Interesting article, but where are the pictures? This is like announcing, "God captured on film! News at eleven!" then just having two anchors describe the footage.

"Atoms Receive 'Movie Star' Treatment"

[Tukla]

You mean there are copies of atomic porn being spread across the Internet?

Public Pressure for Movie??

[oroshana]

Okay, maybe what we need to do is pressure R. J. Dwayne Miller into releasing the movie to the public domain. After all, there are little school children around the world that would have thier entire perception of matter altered by this movie. Go slashdot minions! Find him, and guilt him into posting it here on slashdot. Mwahahaha!

odd...

[cagle_.25]

The aluminum melted in an astonishingly short time-within 3.5 picoseconds.

The article seems to hint that melting processes in general are equally short. But of course, melting on the macroscale does not occur in picoseconds. If you take an ice cube and place it in a 20 deg. C room, it will take a good while to melt. It's easy to see why: it takes time for individual atoms in the solid phase to acquire enough energy to shake free.

The conclusion I draw from the experiment is not that melting occurs rapidly in general, but rather that there is no "in between" transition state between solid and liquid. Now that's cool. It would be neat if they could extend this experiment to substances that have two different liquid forms, like sulfur and see whether there is an intermediate state between them. SiO2 glass might be particularly interesting. We could also investigate dimerizations and all manner of things ... hmmm... to quote the article,

"Chemists think of reactions in terms of atoms moving around as bonds are broken and formed," says Jason Dwyer, a graduate student in Miller's laboratory and a co-author of the paper. "It is one of the dreams of chemistry to be able to actually watch that as it happens, and we now have a technique that lets us do that."

"movie"

[Bowling Moses]

There's a reason for the quotation marks. The researchers did obtain a movie of sorts, in that they repeated their basic experiment to get different timepoints in the melting process. However the frames making up the movie are electron powder diffraction (EPD) images. What you get is basically a pattern of rings centered like a bullseye, and the spacings between the different rings can tell you information about the material like how the atoms are configured. Put in the time component from several images and you can get (in this instance) a "movie" of aluminum melting.

I tried to find a free EPD image, but the closest thing I found was xray powder diffraction [cornell.edu], with fake color--what you get from a diffraction image is greyscale. Anyway, it's a similar experiment, except the material is bombarded with xrays instead of electrons.

Re:"movie"

[Gogo Dodo]

The Science article [sciencemag.org] has an image of the EPD images.

Since there are no pictures, it begs the question:

[uradu]

What color were the atoms?

Where is the movie on deposition

[linzeal]

That is the coolest change in matter unless plasma can go directly to solid, can it?

hehe

[dtfinch]

I bet they chose aluminum to help them forget.

Pictures

[Necro Spork]

They have picture and pretty graphs here! Happy now?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/3 02/564 9/1382

Re:Pictures

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

They have picture and pretty graphs here! Happy now?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/564 9/1382
Which would be handy if I subscribed to Science.
I don't, so all I get is a "Please sign on" page

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