A Boy and His Atom: Smallest Stop-Motion Film [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
https://avsteele.com/index.html#science (scroll down a little)
Each dot is fluorescence from a single trapped barium ion. Excitation/fluorescence is at 493 nm, so the false-color map in the video is almost realistic.
More details are in the figure caption.
My company makes an Scanning Probe Microscope (more commonly known as an AFM) which goes into a Zeiss Scanning Electron Microscope. You can unlock some really neat applications with the combination - scanning areas which would be hard to locate, observing the tip interaction with the sample and using the Focused Ion Beam to remove material from the sample.
With SPM, you can do a variety of measurements - measure the topology, measure the electrical properties, surface potential, conductivity, etc.
Here's a neat video of the system in action:
It's not like normal photography, it's more of a visualization of an electrical current sensor. The background is just the area of the plane they were scanning that didn't have any atoms.
That sounds a bit weird...
The real question is, how is the microscope's output converted into a visual picture? Hint, it isn't by lensing light. Thus there is no "focus" to be out of.
"Copper plate: The scientists used copper 111 as the surface of the animation — the same material they used 10 years ago when they built the first computer that performed digital computation operations. Carbon monoxide (CO): ok The scientists chose carbon monoxide molecules to move around the plate. Carbon monoxide has one carbon atom and one oxygen atom, stacked on top of each other."
http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/madewithatoms.shtml#fbi...
I assume focus / depth of field is why the surface looks smooth. Or whatever the equivalent of that is for a scanning/tunnelling microscope.
If anything I would posture that they’ve filmed the backplate and the A atoms are the shadow from the scattering of the electrons that didn’t hit the backplate.