Carbon nanotube field emitters are at present the brightest available electron sources but must operate at low currents to avoid Coulomb expansion and are therefore not suitable for ultrafast imaging.

The electron is an efficient catalyst for conducting various types of radical cascade reaction that proceed by way of radical and radical ion intermediates. But because electrons are omnipresent, ...

Scientists have calculated how it is possible to look inside the atom to image individual electron orbitals. An electron microscope can't just snap a photo like a mobile phone camera can. The ability ...

Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since—so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen ...

When most of us picture an atom, we think about a small nucleus made of protons and neutrons orbited by one or more electrons. We view these electrons as point-like while rapidly orbiting the nucleus.

It’s like catching light in action. For the first time, physicists have measured changes in an atom to the level of zeptoseconds, or trillionths of a billionth of a second – the smallest division of ...

In recent years, heat has stopped being just a number on a thermometer and has become something we can literally see at the atomic scale. In 2025, an ...

Back in the late 90s, a physicist in Australia put forward a design for a quantum computer. Bruce Kane suggested that phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon would be the ideal way to store and ...

If you expanded an atom to the size of a baseball, what would it look like? And how would the inside look if you sliced it open? The nucleus is the atom’s central core and contains more than 99.9 ...

For millennia, atoms had been phantoms, widely suspected to exist but remaining stubbornly invisible — though not indivisible, as their name (Greek for “uncuttable”) originally implied. By the start ...

The Bohr model, introduced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913, was a key step on the journey to understand atoms. Ancient Greek thinkers already believed that matter was composed of tiny basic ...