Is That …

No, that’s not our handy-dandy “bureaucratic translator,” although it does bear a striking resemblance to the machine that we use to turn governmental gobbledygook into understandable English.

That contraption is actually an atomic force microscope, which was recently used by scientists at IBM (those sexy beasts) to take the first-ever picture of a molecule.

This picture …

Crazy, huh?  That’s actually 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms combining to form a pentacene molecule, which are found in solar cells.  To give you some sense of perspective, the space between those rings is 0.14 nanometers across – or approximately one-millionth the diameter of the period at the end of this sentence.

So how does the atomic force microscope (AFM) manage to capture such a groundbreaking image?

From the UK Daily Mail:

The AFM uses a sharp metal tip that acts like a tuning fork to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the molecule. This requires great precision as the tip moves within a nanometer of the sample.

‘Above the skeleton of the molecular backbone (of the pentacene) you get a different detuning than above the surface the molecule is lying on,’ Mr Gross said.

This detuning is then measured and converted into an image.

To stop the tip from absorbing the pentacene molecule, the researchers replaced the metal with a single molecule of carbon monoxide. This was found to be more stable and created weaker electrostatic attractions with the pentacene, creating a higher resolution image.

In other words, precisely as we surmised, people.  Precisely as we surmised.

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