This article was wonderful. We have had light and electron microscopes. Can we look forward to atom-wave microscopes?
Bill Schindele Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Yes. A team led by Bodil Holst at Graz University of Technology in Austria has built a microscope that bombards a sample with helium waves and then measures how the waves reflect to create a picture. In late 2007, Holst’s team took the first-ever two-dimensional picture with a helium atom microscope: a blurry image of a tiny, honeycomb-shaped grating.
—Ewen Callaway
Log in
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.