students at OHIO, used a purpose-built synchrotron X-ray instrument at the XTIP beamline of Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.įor demonstration, the team chose an iron atom and a terbium atom, both inserted in respective molecular hosts.

Their paper, published in the scientific journal Nature on May 31, 2023, and gracing the cover of the print version of the scientific journal on June 1, 2023, details how Hla and several other physicists and chemists, including Ph.D. This discovery will transform the world.' This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences and maybe even find a cure that can have a huge impact for humankind. 'Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to ultimate limit of just one atom. We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state,' explained Hla, who is also the director of the Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute at Ohio University. 'Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of. According to Hla, it is a long-standing dream of scientists to X-ray just one atom, which is now being realized by the research team led by him. This is due to the X-ray signal produced by an atom being extremely weak so that the conventional X-ray detectors cannot be used to detect it. To date, the smallest amount one can X-ray a sample is in attogram, that is about 10,000 atoms or more. Over the years, the quantity of materials in a sample required for X-ray detection has been greatly reduced thanks to the development of synchrotron X-rays sources and new instruments. An important usage of X-rays in science is to identify the type of materials in a sample. Even Curiosity, NASA's Mars rover, is equipped with an X-ray device to examine the materials composition of the rocks in Mars.

Since its discovery by Roentgen in 1895, X-rays have been used everywhere, from medical examinations to security screenings in airports.

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