Hey everybody! comments, corrections, and FAQs here: 1) Go check out reddit.com/r/trytryagain, there are a bunch of posts now and it's great! 2) Thanks to Kunal and Aidan for previewing this video and making sure I wasn't too egregiously wrong in my explanations! Kunal wanted to add that for TEM and STEM imaging, the vast majority of the time the sample isn't pointed "at the beam" - normally it's at a wonky angle to produce very specific diffraction effects. This lets us do some cool things, like look at strain fields from dislocations, but I didn't do that in this video. Also because of diffraction effects, by the time you've zoomed all the way into atoms, the "shadow" analogy is actually pretty terrible, and image formation is complicated (hence switching to STEM). Aidan had some comments on STEM-vs-TEM, notably that despite the beam paths being completely different, they actually DO interact with the sample in largely the same way and produce similar contrast when you aren't at atomic resolution. When I said they were mechanistically completely different, that was accurate from the perspective of the mechanics of the microscope being different, but the beam-sample interaction physics is EXTREMELY similar. 2 (TLDR) I swept a lot under the rug in order to focus exclusively on atomic-resolution microscopy - Diffraction and strain contrast microscopy is arguably a lot more important, certainly more common, but also a LOT more complicated. 3) I've got t-shirts for sale! If you ever wanted to have a t-shirt with a giant red flaming alpha on the front - NOW YOU CAN… alphaphoenix.creator-spring.com/ 4) If anybody's super-curious, here's the paper we published: doi: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.cgd.2c00188 unfortunately it's not on SciHub yet, but if you check back in a couple days I should have a link to the manuscript available! 5) I’ve had a lot of people ask about the drift - yes the sample is rigidly mounted, and yes the beam keeps pointing in the same direction, but when was the last time you tried to hold something so still that it didn’t move by an atom? Thermal expansion and contraction is actually a huge problem - if the sample stage is warmer than the microscope, when you load it in, the arm that holds the sample is going to cool down and contract - super slowly - for a couple hours minimum, and that’s enough to ruin long exposure pictures with crazy rolling shutter artifacts. 6) a few people have mentioned the mask and while I think most of these commenters are just being irritants because they can, it actually brings up a very interesting point about these scopes. To reduce noise, vibration, and changes in temperature, the room that houses this microscope is designed to have almost zero air changeover. This is fantastic for consistent microscope operation, but real bad to leave an airborne virus in a room and have somebody else walk into the same air a few minutes later. 7) I did some math and changed the title from 10000000x magnification to 50000000x magnification (eh - same order of magnitude). magnification is very poorly-defined because it technically depends on the viewing screen. There IS a "standard" display size from when all TEM images were published on paper in the same journal format, but I don't remember the size, so I took one of the shots where I was focusing with a field of view of a little over 4 nanometers and assumed it was 8-10 inches tall on the monitor, then rounded nicely. according to the manufacturer's site, the magnification goes up to 230M - again, not sure what the intended display size is. I wonder if they ship computer monitors with the microscope??? 8) I'm sure there are more things wrong or fuzzy so complain away and I'll add notes here!
Why is all that focusing lenses process done by hand? It looks like it could be done by some software itself using either sensors or IA to detect patterns on the image
There are so many cool things in the world, and I wish everybody passionate about their field had the chance to share. I’ve been so shocked at the reception to these videos over the last year on what I thought were super-obscure topics, and it just reinforces the old Feynman quote that “everything in interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” Keep being curious everybody!
Indeed, but the catch is that a third of the people will likely call it evil because of the fact that the earth is flat. (How can I convey a tone of sarcasm through text?)
I remember growing up not too long ago where in science classes we were told that an atom has never been photographed and now it’s so exciting that we finally have
@@QianyiLi-bi7jli remember about 10 or so years ago there was big talk about scientists releasing first footage of atoms and it wasn’t even this good. Before that, it was like OC said. We are literally among wizards tricking rocks into thinking for us
@@QianyiLi-bi7jlnot the OP, but pre-2008 at the very minimum. If we wanted to say a computer assisted way, probably pre-1996. That’s just a guesstimate
What is funny here is that I am currently employed at a factory that makes these things. And I find it cool that I understand some of the things he is showing on screen, purely from the setup and assembly perspective.
I used to think I was pretty smart. Then I realized that someone had to create this machine and that knocked me down a few pegs. This guy did a great job dumbing it down for me and is a natural educator.
Doesn't mean "you are not smart" or "less smart". Much of this type of work is by trail and error. And persuing an idea, refining it and slowly zoning into something that works. Probably this machine hasn't been conceptualized "by a single person" and "by just sitting at the desk and started drawing". It's usually rigorous effort and endurance, persistence. And usually it's also a hyper focussed ability to a very niche or small detaillistic branch of study or applied studies. All it takes is "bringing your above your intellect that is above average in your surroundings", into a situation where it becomes average ("peers") or below average ("mentors"). And start doing things and keep putting in the work. And perhaps one day you'll get a spark of inspiration, or grow into expertise in one or another thing. And realize how far you have grown and come compared to where you were before. If you feel "you are smarter as those around you", you can either try to get into a context where you can apply this. Or you can mentor those you notice are not "so bright as yourself". It's never too late. There will be always someone more intelligent as you, from a little bit to lightyears ahead. But the reverse is also true: there will be always people much less intelligent as yourself.
machine like that is the result of decades of ENTIRE CULTURES working through tiny increases. millions of people to get a machine like that, even the grunts digging ditches for materials are part of the process. it's not ONE person, ever was. even one person needs to go to school for years learning what many people passed down through generations. no one is an island, no one. humans are powerful because we can cooperate and specialize. you could say none of this is possible without farming. without farming we all go back to hunter gatherers.
The SEM operators at AT&T , Bell Laboratories only had high school educations . Your not dumb , would only need 90 days training . Least wise , that’s what the union IBEW allowed to qualify for that job classification .
This is amazing. Is there not an ability to save all values to “re-find” a specific spot on a specific orientation of the sample or is it way more complicated than that?
There are lots of automated return-to-spot and autofocus and stuff like that, but for research level stuff I never trusted them lol. Once I got help on one of the newer SEMs for some problem or another and somebody pressed the “auto contrast and brightness” button and it did a startlingly good job - I was stunned! If you were in a production environment checking a lot of samples for the same thing it’d be a no-brainer. Granted in this case “next to the white dot” probably could have been EASILY solved with the save location feature, I just never bothered to learn to use it… I don’t think it could save tilts also, only x-y-z coordinates, but that may be wrong, and considering that the sample was pretty warped, you need to tilt differently at different spots so it’s SLIGHTLY more complicated. On a completely separate note, how do you guys feel about the Chronos 2.1? I just turned ads on on my (hobby) channel for the first time and slomo capability beyond my phone’s 240fps is a primary goal of that. Anything else (less than a phantom) you’d recommend 😂? Big fan of your guys’ stuff!!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Is it possible to set the microscope to scan autonomously? I was wondering if it is possible, using a mix of auto-focus, image processing and scripting, to capture high fidelity images of whole samples. Then use some funky image processing to pick out interesting spots. Like you said, because it is for research you may not trust this sort of stuff/may not use the machine for a purpose that requires messing around with any programmable functions it may have in order to analyse whole samples. I’d really love to have a play with one of these, it looks like a lot of (tedious) fun. I’m afraid my pocket money may not cover it though…
@@krishyfishy1 I'm not a scientist but as a software engineer I think machine learning could be used to combine multiple exposures, denoise the image, and even auto-detect irregularities, if you had enough samples to train it with.
@@krishyfishy1 In theory, yes. In practice, the challenge of the autofocus is twofold. First is that if it fails, the microscope (which is very expensive) spends a lot of time capturing terrible images. If you have a (relatively cheap) scientist doing the searching, then you can save a lot of money. The second is that every material that you try to image will look different when focussing. I work with cryo-bio samples, and they are VERY different under the STEM. The same ML program wouldn't work for both types of materials. Now, I work with a system called ptychography, where we collect very defocussed diffraction images at each point in a STEM scan, so each pixel of that image contains another full image of data, and a slight change in focus is a lot less important there so you only have to correct the other issues in the microscope. The problem is that you need to computationally reconstruct the image, which takes a lot of compute.
@@ryanmccampbell7 It's true that with ML you can do denoising. In fact, we do! But you can't get more information out of an image than the electrons originally carried. Also, the kinds of irregularities that we are looking for look different on every sample, so by the time you have your training set, it isn't as worth doing.
What a spectacular video. I recall Ben Krasnow once commenting about how capturing the initial joy and wonder of scientific discovery in a RUclips video is extremely difficult, but you’ve done a wonderful job of that here, as well as giving excellent explanations as to how it all works. Well done
Wow... at 70 years old, I'm absolutely and totally off the scale awestruck. Thank you so much for all of the time and effort you did in producing this video and the excellent explanations.
I'm 27 and honestly the feeling is no different. The engineering that must've gone into this, built upon the collective knowledge gathered over the course of centuries, to produce a machine that can image _atoms_ is simply unbelievable. Tell that to someone a hundred years ago and they'd look at you confused, and ask you what you've been smoking. It's all magic to me. Hats off to the many boffins who worked to put this together, and incredible what can be achieved when people work together toward a common goal.
@@Zappygunshot I honestly didn't belive it when I first heard of it. But I actually see how it works. And it's crazy that with just a relatively few images you can actually show the scale of atoms now.
Something that always blows my mind is the engineering that goes in to different scientific instrumentation. Those instruments are the culmination of thousands upon thousands of hours of work from many different people. Years of work before you can even start to do your work.
For me one of the most attractive aspects of physics is creating new tools for other scientists and engineers to use. There are many scientific groups pushing boundaries of tools to open up new fields of science to extract a bit of knowledge about something. Examples: Shortest light pulses - so called attosecond lasers - let us study fundamental physical processes (Phyiscs Nobel Price 2023) Highest power lasers - so called petawatt lasers - open new avenues of accelerating particles or doing nuclear science and many other things STED microscopes - pushing the resolution for optical microscopes below 100nm These are the ones I am somewhat familiar with but there are many others. Some try to cool atoms to lowest temperatures, other to create pulse light at very short wavelengths (x-ray). Not everything becomes a device that you put in your lab, but for example the STED microscope did.
Extremely cool to see the entire process. I've seen the output images in papers and science reporting, but it's refreshing to see the entire (cumbersome) process leading up to such results.
Cumbersome process are the bread and butter of anything computer related... 3D models look cool and have lots of information, but only after someone, or entire groups of someones, spend days and weeks and months putting the models together and debugging them. I have been that someone.... and it was pretty fun. Lol
I worked for the DOE for a few years and ran an EB (electron beam) welder. Very different but but this video brought back some memories. Also my uncle ran an Electron Microscope and analyzed samples from Ground Zero for asbestos. Unfortunately he passed a few years ago from mesothelioma but he would take us kids to his lab and show us all kinds of cool things. My fav part was playing with liquid Nitrogen lol. Anyways thanks for bringing back such great memories ❤
I get really excited over crystals… the bizarrely mathematical order that falls out of random giggling is unfathomably beautiful. (I think you have a similar feeling about laminar flow 😁)
It’s really cool how you can look at the (admittedly complex) math for how particles work, and it’s so simple compared to the millions or billions or more of phenomena that arise from the same math. Atoms all follow the same rules, but they interact in so many different ways.
It's funny how nonchalantly he states "oh look, atoms!" I found myself holding my breath while looking at the pictures. I think it's simultaneously exciting and terrifying to see the building blocks of our universe.
the way you overlap the results you see from theoretical explanation to the real world almost seamlessly really should be what every academic institution should strive to do when teaching these concepts. I've always loved being able to see an explanation like this and I strive to demonstrate it whenever I teach as well. It strikes an incredible chord between seeing tangible results to what seem like abstract concepts at first, as well as imparting a true sense of wonder for the universe. If this doesn't get you excited about science then nothing will! Stunning video as always
I completely rearranged the first half of this video a few times… and I really liked how it settled with the light shadow image being cut to the electron shadow, and then doing it again with the scanning. Glad you liked it!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel The light shadow example was hugely helpful. One thing that might improve it would be to have a camera recording as your laser scans the ping pong balls against the cardboard, then composite the frames from the recording over each other to demonstrate the blurriness / clarity depending on the beam size and shape. Not sure if that would be more or less tedious than hand drawing the dots on a sheet of graph paper 😂
What strikes me is the opposite - that while now we as humans have such amazing technology that allows imaging nano-scales, seeing submicrosecond processes (high-speed cameras), recording picosecond electrical perturbations (oscilloscopes), for the largest part of the scientific history scientists had to do with only the most basic of instruments, and had to develop and imagine complex concepts completely in their head. Like, for example, the idea that a capacitor and inductor can create electrical oscillations was proposed well before the invention of the oscilloscopes just on the basis of the observation that the residual charge on a capacitor after a discharge is sometimes positive, and sometimes negative. And the whole theory of atomic structure was developed based on x-ray diffraction patterns, which do not directly image anything particular at all (they appear in an inverted space). The broadness of human mind is just stunning. Just wanted to add my two cents here
That’s incredibly badass. I knew advanced electron microscopes were around, but showing us the magnetic lenses, the impressive sample aperture, well... Really great job explaining each step with enough detail to be appreciated! It’s incredible engineering, ambitious objectives, and a mind-blowing achievement, and you did a great job conveying a ton of info in a brief time. Thanks for the video, and congratulations on finding the phenomenon! And a paper! Nice!
@@kratoleaf7619 Yes, atoms have a nucleus. We know quite a lot about atomic nuclei since at least the 1960ies. In fact we know the constituent parts of the constituent parts of atomic nuclei. We can also create artificial atomic nuclei that do not occur in nature (since decades). We can even manipulate atomic nuclei (it is somewhat tedious though) - that field is called "nuclear chemistry". Here is a "map" of all atomic nuclei currently know (natural and artificial ones): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides
In fact most of the public still know nothing about machines like this since they are not interested. This is why this particular video has 80k views while Shakira regularly gets 100M+. Sadly.
The first "lens" to focus electromagnetic radiation was made by a German scientist named Hans Busch in 1926. The so-called "Übermikroskop" was subsequently invented by Ruska and Knoll also in Germany by 1931. Here is how that turned out by 1949 built by Siemens: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Elektronenmikroskop.UeM100.Ernst.Ruska.TU-Berlin.jpg It looks like something out of a mad scientist's lab.
TEM is in fact a quite old innovation, dates back to WW2. You can check the dates from wikipedia. STEM is whole another story, modern computing power makes it possible.
You've taken me back to when I was doing my PhD! Hours upon hours upon hours on an SEM, trying to find particular weld defects or characterising fracture surfaces (I think I got a little triggered when you mentioned "stig", lol). You really communicated well that elation you get when, after god knows how many hours and how many samples, you find exactly the feature you were looking for, and you know you've gone from something purely theoretical to something with actual evidence behind it. I also got super pumped when that happened!
Neat stuff! I can't believe you can make the equivalent of an optical quality lens with magnetic fields. I'd be interested to learn more about how those rings are tuned and controlled.
I don’t know exactly how the fields are constructed, but in terms of precision, magnetic lenses are apparently absolutely atrocious. I’ve heard the analogy that all TEM is like looking through a coke bottle bottom instead of a microscope objective. “Aberration corrected” scopes add a few hundred thousand dollars to the cost of the scope, and are crazy impressive, but they still don’t even begin to approach the theoretical resolution limit we should be able to hit with electrons. If somebody figures out that coil geometry it’ll be pretty incredible! Happy to see you here - glad you enjoyed the video! I’ve been thinking about a miniature vortex shooter for a long time - especially if it could capture and carry a separate gas. In your vortex cannon experiments did you notice any trends that produced consistently faster of slower vortex rings? I don’t know if the tiny-but-super-fast vortex ring I’ve been imagining has ANY foundation in reality. Also your stoichiometric hydrogen burner is terrifying 😂
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel That's interesting! I like hearing when already impressive tech has known areas that could be massively improved. My vortex cannon is pretty much reliant on pure brute force. I haven't played much with the geometry, I just try to nail the best gas mix for a proper bang. The shape is modeled after hail cannons. I've tried constructing little versions with metal cones made for baking cream horns, but no success yet. Actually the smallest and most impressive vortex ring launcher I discovered by accident. I had a hollow plastic wiffle ball bat in a swimming pool and the base of the handle had about a 5mm hole in it. When the bat was full of water if you tapped it on the bottom of the pool it launched a dime size water vortex with enough force to fire clear out of the water and several feet into the air. Not sure if you could get the same power out of a tiny gas filled chamber, but maybe with a high power acoustic driver.
He's exactly right that TEM lenses are terrible in comparison to optical. Because the aberrations are so bad, you need to keep the numerical aperture tiny. It's the *very* tiny wavelength (2.51 pm for 200 keV electrons) that saves you.
Now, to really blow your mind, ponder for a minute the fact that we truly cannot even begin to fathom the true scale of the universe, simply because we cannot see it from the same kind of perspective that this one human does of this tiny sample. (There are building blocks to atoms that are smaller yet...who knows how small it goes?) Then consider the possiblity that we are akin to tiny little parasites sitting on what might amount to one of those atoms, and unbeknownst to us we are basically like bacteria in the gut of an insanely huge being and all the stars we can see are just the building blocks of say, some cells in a stomach. We can't see or detect the rest of the universe because of the limited scope of our existence much as bacteria in our gut cannot see or fathom beyond what is right next to it- it doesnt even know it is in the gut of another being. Makes ya feel smal thinking of it like that.
PhD candidate in chemistry on his last year here. I have a couple years experience of electron imaging under my belt, and I gotta say, you did a fantastic job with this video! It's always insanely difficult to get people to appreciate the work behind these kinds of images unless they themselves have done some sort of work with sensitive instruments like these. Holding your hands up off the table both in optimistic superstition and to give yourself the best chance not to slightly bump the table and throw the image off, the "still a lil bit of stig" comment after a WHOLE lot of focusing, using VESTA to visually explain concepts, using Velox as opposed to Esprit (that's a personal thing - I hate Esprit). It's so clear that you have done a lot of work in this field, yet you still show those little OCD tendencies that microscopists (or any scientist on this small a scale) usually do and should have. It shows you're still learning and want to improve. It shows you wanted this video to be as comprehensive as possible, and I can only imagine the time it took to edit it all together, as well as the risk you took of filming live research when you could've come up empty-handed. Kudos to you; please take my subscribe.
I have known about the science and technology behind STEM since IBM discovered it, and a few Nobel Prizes were awarded. It is incredibly time consuming. Imagine looking for a dime on a football field. Some images would take a few days to focus, and a week or two to image process. This is a brilliant explanation.
I think the reason why this type of work is less appreciated, is because everybody knew that the misalignment was there for sure. They just needed someone to prove it with the right tools.
I work at Thermo Fisher Scientific (the maker of this particular microscope) on these microscopes; including the Talos and the Velox application as seen in the video. It's great to see our microcopes used in the wild like this.
You have some nice microscopes! We have a Helios G4UX - really a great tool allowing for some great results! At least until theres something to be fixed. But your technicians are also really good.
My friend, this is probably the coolest video I have ever seen. Thank you so much for taking us on this journey, and congratulations on your discovery!
Yeah it can be. The microscope holder is really precise, but when you're viewing at that high of a magnification even "really precise" can feel challenging. In my experience the trickiest part is tilting the sample to zone axis. One of the tilt directions is designed to be eucentric when you're in focus (i.e. the image of the sample doesn't move laterally while you're tilting in that direction), but the other direction is not, so every time you make a tilt adjustment in that direction the image in your field of view changes completely. Very frustrating if you're doing something like this where you're trying to look at one particular feature of interest. Handling the sample outside of the microscope can also be a bit tricky, but it's really not so bad if you're patient and make sure not to suck the thin bit off your sample with the vacuum tweezers.
It's really tough. I tend to not drink caffeine or any other stimulants on days that I'll be handling materials. Really though, we have protocols that give us a checklist. We have to progress through the checklist which allows for a lot of focus and clarity.
"I'm going to be looking for a specific thing, and I'm not sure I'll find it, but I'll still learn something" is the most sciencest science thing any scientist has ever scienced.
I do astrophotography and I share you’re amazement that we have the technology to see the very large/far away and the very small. It’s like prying secrets out of reality that we humans aren’t supposed to see.
Yes and no, TEM as explained in the video it's used to cast a shadow in an extreme vacuum. This vacuum destroys organic matter by boiling any liquid off. To image bio material a special machine cryoTEM is developed. This freezes any materials to prevent it from boiling and moving. This invention was awarded the Nobel price is 2017. Source: I developed the firmware for these machines
18:30 I relate to this thought so much! After spending thousands of hours in front of an SEM looking at mostly features within the 10nm-150um range, I feel as if you just pulled back the curtain to what Ive always wanted to experience - to see actual atoms. This was truly delightful to see!
I work with a TEM at a local hospital to take micrographs of tissue for the pathology department. All of electron microscopy is extremely complex and delicate. I have had samples literally just fly away because of a change in room pressure from opening a door. We use microtomy to get the samples to the appropriate thickness and use heavy metal stain to render a beautiful live image.
With your TEM, How do you separate or isolate a specific or individual virus from the surrounding tissue and other bodily fluids ? Or is that even possible ?
@@michaeltaylors2456 I work normally with clinical tissue specimens. Here, we are almost never looking for viruses, but rather abnormalities (disease) in tissues. Some research cases come in and they are looking for viruses, but those are already submitted to me in an aqueous solution from the PI. I am sure there is a standard (and probably even simple) protocol to separate viruses from tissue via cell lysis, etc. There is, however, very particular protocols that must be followed to view viruses under the TEM that greatly differ from those for clinical specimens. I think that this is a question better suited for Med Techs, Histo Techs, and Research Scientists. Hope this helps a little!
I don't know how old you are, but imaging individual atoms was probably possible throughout the majority of your lifetime. The field ion microscope was invented in 1951 and was to my knowledge one of the first microscopy techniques with atomic resolution. In 1970, it was first demonstrated that STEM can image individual atoms as well. And since the 90ies there is a wealth of scanning probe techniques available (STM, AFM, ...) which have featured atomic resolution right from the start. We've been there all along :)
I design electron microscope rooms for low noise and vibration and this video gives me a deeper appreciation for these amazing instruments and the scientists who use them!
@@mikejrSAA Usually involves "room within room" construction for sound isolation and isolated slabs for vibration control depending on site conditions and what else is in the building. Architectural space layouts for the microscopy suite also need to be carefully designed since there's a lot of support equipment and operators may need to be in separate rooms to not disturb the microscope. Basically an integrated design that involves the structural engineer, architect, and mechanical/electrical/plumbing engineers all considering acoustics and vibration along with everything else.
your physical examples are amazing and brilliantly thought out, especially using the gimbal and laser to explain scanning. That looks like it took an eternity to set up, film, and edit, but it was extremely effective at explaining the principal
This makes me think about those who had none of the info we had now. No hypothesis, no images, and no life study from peers, but they still figured the shapes and functions out. They had theoretical models created and started decoding the mystery of something no one really even knew existed. Mind-blowing.
Damn. I have trouble sometimes with small print, and here you are not reading the print, but instead looking at home the ink melds into the paper (so to speak). I'm glad people like you exist because it pushes our understanding what is going on in the super small environment of atoms. Hats off to you..
I started working with my schools TEM and SEM recently for my undergrad research. It has been an incredible experience, and I just love working with these machines! Since I started my research, I’ve never felt more excited about science and technology than I am now!
I like how the decorators thought that, after hours of staring at grainy grey grid like things, what you really want to see when you look away... is more grey grid like things.
So those are actually huge radiators/air vents that keep the room all one temperature without basically any air exchange. If this was a higher resolution scope I wouldn’t even be able to be in the room while it was running. Aberration-corrected scopes are almost always driven remotely so the operator’s body heat and breathing aren’t a problem
You're a truly excellent educator, I'm not a materials scientist, but I am involved with the field of machine/artificial cognition (not "AI") . If we had even half the level of quality of this content in our field, I truly believe we'd be significantly further ahead in bringing people into what we're doing as well. Massive well done, thank you so much for sharing your expertise so freely & in such an accessible form here!!
I feel like this is one of those fields of study where you can get so lost in what you're doing that you pay little mind to what you're *actually* doing. This is to say, doing all the focusing and imaging is a tedious task that requires a bunch of effort and focus, which just serves to distract from the fact that what's happening in a more literal sense is that a car-sized machine is being used to examine features on an object so incomprehensibly tiny. What you're doing is tantamount to witchcraft, with the limitations of the machine not only being down to quality, but also due to butting up against the very physical laws of the universe. This is all to say that this is one of those things that the more you describe it, the crazier it gets. But, somehow, this insanity is so normalized that you can say "Look! Atoms!" without losing your head.
It's all fun for starting years as an Electron microscopy operator/Engineer, specially TEM..But it gets boring and tiring with time.Patience is main thing in electron microscopy..
Once upon a time, December 1989, I was sitting on a transPacific flight chatting with an engineer discussing a possible gimbal design for that sample holder. Very cool to see a one in real life rather than sketched on paper, and fantasies of verbal imagination!
Fantastic video! Your demonstrations made this a highly educational and accessible video, even if they are imperfect representations. It makes me happy that your institution is willing to let you publish videos created using their facilities. Another benefit is video evidence to your supervisor that you were hard at work all that time. I feel your pain at spending hours fiddling with settings in front of a microscope, although my own experience was with fluorescent microscopy and molecular genetics. I still remember my excitement the first time I was able to see the expression of two different proteins at the 8 cell stage during nematode development using GFP and RFP tagged proteins.
I love how when the first pics of atoms came out everyone was super stoked just like when the first black hole photos came out, but now it just seems like a tedious desk job. Still amazing, but the march of progress seems to humble even the most amazing things.
Agree regarding progress in image processing, not so much on the faulty attribution that an AGN, or anything, is a black hole. Astrophysics is riddled with confirmation bias and bad science, but the imaging methods can be celebrated.
Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond my control, I never finished high school. The way you explained what you were doing is so incredible, that even I, tottaly understood it. Amazing!
School loses its value after 8-9th grade in my opinion. After that, it seems like it's more about dealing with a workload than it's about learning. My point is I don't think not finishing high school would've changed how much of this video you understood
@@wayneparkinson4558maybe I misinterpreted your comment..... I can't speak for all "drop outs" but in my case, it was a necessity. Regardless, without spending a single day in high school, I managed to learn how to speak and write in 3 languages, have my own buisness for 20 years in which I provided a future for over 20 families, own my home, my "toys" and be semi retired at 50. It's the desire to learn, and become something, and no school can give you that.
Hey, love your videos! As a microscopy guy, I was impressed with how well an electrical engineer can understand optics!! ;) Notice the key to getting a well-formed image on your screen is that the position of the ball bearings is a little bit /farther/ than the focal length of the lens, but less than double that distance, as anything beyond 2f would de-magnify, rather than magnify your image. The screen will only have a sharp image projected on it in one location with a fixed position of the ball bearings. Moving the screen back farther will only blur the image. You can change the magnification by bringing L2 closer (increase magnification) or move L2 farther away (reduce magnification) and repositioning the screen accordingly (noting you cannot bring the bearings closer to the lens than its focal length since no image will be formed at all past this point). The flashlight and pinhole are now serving merely as illumination of the ball bearings and are no longer taking part in image formation. They set up you ideal "object" to be imaged, which is light passing through gaps in the ball bearings, and L2 is just projecting an image of that onto your screen! You can confirm this by moving lens 1 out of position so the light is no longer perfectly collimated and you'll still see the sharp edges of the ball bearings at your screen just as before, only now you will probably notice the image gets darker towards the edges. Similarly, you could replace L1 with another lens of a different focal length and the size and quality of your resulting image will be identical because L2 does all the work. That narrowing of the beam of light you see is happening right at L2's focal length (assuming L1 is collimating perfectly). This is the image of the pinhole created by the combination of L1 and L2. L1 collimates the light, and L2 focuses it again, creating an image at a distance equal to its focal length. Many microscopes use collimation in their imaging and illumination systems, because the part of the optical path between L1 and L2 can be made as long or short as you like and it doesn't change the outcome very much. You can also stick all sorts of filters or optics in the light path here without affecting the image quality, which cannot be said for putting optics in a converging or diverging path.
It's not often I watch a 20 minute video all the way through, but I was literally leaning forward on the edge of my seat, rooting for you to find what you were looking for so I could see it too. Thanks for posting this, and I'm glad I just found your channel. Existence is fascinating!
I've never seen how a scanning microscope works, and with this video you ABSOLUTELY nailed how to explain it! This is one of the best and most enthusiastic (actual) science videos I've ever seen! Kudos!
Awesome stuff! When I read the title I thought we'd be seeing AFM or Scanning *Tunneling* EM, but I'd never heard of this method, cool! I actually do molecular bio, so our sample preparation is hilariously different from a materials scientist's, but still really nice to know at least a basis of what you're explaining 💪
People definitely do cryo-TEM to image proteins and stuff, although the sample handling to make that work sounds like an incredible pain in the ass to me.
@@realityChemist I’ve seen people in the prep room flash freezing stuff for cryo tem before. Always looked like a real pain! Edit: nitrogen everywhere!
wow, the green graphic overlay describing the focus/process was really a eureka moment for me. thanks so much for being so creative in describing an insane process we take for granted.
I used to study ultrathin biological samples with electron microscopes 35 years ago. We couldn't go down to atomic level, just to the size of intracellular structures, but the process was very similar to what you have presented, and it was sometimes quite nerve-wracking to set the focus and everything right. At that time only a very few really powerful microscopes were able to see the the outline of atoms. Since then, there's been a great leap forward in technology. Keep on with the good work!👍
The microscope knows where the atoms are at all times. It know this, because it knows where the atoms aren't. By subtracting where the atom is, from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or, deviation...
Absolutely fascinating to see an actual picture of the building blocks of our world, it really puts things in perspective when you realize that no matter how different everything in this world may look, when we break it down and look deep enough everything is made of these building blocks. Awesome video my friend, also you have amazing patience lol, I get frustrated when it takes more than 10 seconds for my phone to focus on something I'm trying to photograph, I can't imagine having to concentrate for hours to get the beam lined up with the sample and the sample lined up with the beam. Your channel is criminally underrated, if I had science teachers showing me things like this back when I was in school than it prob wouldn't have taken me until my late 20s early 30s to really take a deep interest in science.
Inspiring to see an young guy 2022 talking "science" at this deeper level ! Please do more. I saw your video with your dad's observatory few years ago. It made be built one for myself.
I did some electron microscopy back when I was at college. We has a TEM, SEM and STEM but I only ever used the scanning electron microscope. Pretty much everything sees atoms. Very few things can resolve atomic scale though.
@@dxb338 does anyone even see anything ? humans have like this GUI that pre-process all information, you are seeing a model of what your brain built to represent what it is seeing.
@@monad_tcp yeah i was gonna go that far but decided to stop at what *eyes* can "see." I mean your visual cortex can be directly stimulated by high energy particles or low energy hits to the head. And then yeah reality tunnels and such. But eyes see photons simple enough for me.
you really explain things in a very easy to understand way. even for someone who even can't remember the little he learned in high school ( me ).. basically knows 0 science - and i am not talking about just this video, your whole channel. you are amazing
What a great video, brother. I used an SEM in grad school for carbon nanotube research, and I can appreciate your frustrations!! I can also appreciate a successful image. There aren’t words that can describe the feeling of getting the image you’re after. You did a great job describing everything. I love this stuff!!
I’m surprised that there wasn’t more on this done publicly before, I remember recently looking up videos for atoms and all I could find were godawful foreign clickbait channels. I know that atoms have been visualized before with microscopes, but something like this showing the structure and geometry ive never seen before, and as someone who went through their first semester, as a chemistry major (first of eight years), I find this fascinating. I don’t know what else to say besides thank you for showing something incredible like this :)
@@HENERlKO its how the atoms are actually shown, there are imperfections that can be caused by alot of things when observing at an atomic like this, but i think its completely nihilistic for this guy to think that could result in the findings of this video.
That is a whole can of worms; Williams and Carter have a four-textbook series on TEM, and the entire second book is dedicated to diffraction. I'm sure you could condense it down into a video by throwing out a lot of the details though. In brief, the Kikuchi lines come in parallel pairs that form Kikuchi bands, and it's possible to follow these bands by tilting the sample to a region where a bunch of them converge into a star-like pattern. That happens at low-order zone axes (think of those as "simple" directions, like looking straight at the face of a cube, straight at one of its edges, straight at a corner, etc). Since low-order axes usually give us the best chance at seeing what we're looking for, we aim for those. This is complicated by the fact that if the sample is very thin (often desirable for STEM), you'll barely see Kikuchi lines, if you see any at all. There are also the individual diffraction spots (or disks, in STEM mode). Those contain a ton of information and some people do TEM just to look at the diffraction patterns without caring too much about the image. They're also helpful for alignment though, as you when you're near but not on a zone axis they form a sort of partial ring. If you tilt in such a way that the ring closes up toward the center, you'll approach a zone axis. The best way to ensure you're actually on zone in STEM mode is to collect a PACBED, which is a diffraction image collected while scanning the beam. The way it looks is very sensitive to tilt, and you can usually tell if you're mistilted by just a few milliradians just by looking at it. The downside is that it's an average of everything in your field of view, so if your sample is very bendy it might not accurately represent the tilting of your whole image. When you need to do stuff like map the bending of the sample at atomic res, it's time to switch to 4D STEM
Telescope mirror finishing videos demonstrate and explain the technique with a variety of such patterns. As I understand it they use them to visualize and verify the curvature of the mirror surface.
As a student majoring mechanical engineering in South Korea, this video inspired me a lot. I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for sharing your experience.
i went to school with a guy who worked on one of the early imaging devices that measured the deflection of particles away from a sample. the way he described it, was that it was a sample placed in a circular chamber with a particle gun pointing at it. from what i remember, he was shooting mostly electrons, but they could also shoot alpha, beta, and gamma radiation at the sample. then they had a detection medium that was wrapped around the chamber that housed the sample. they had different methods for detecting different particles, but in general it was a medium that emitted photons when it was excited with electrons. then on the other side of that, they had digital photon detectors all over the place. all put together, it allowed him to take digital data sets of where electrons where going after they were being deflected by a sample. he was a really fascinating guy, and an absolute genius. he was older and had started basically collecting degrees and was working on a masters in CS. its one thing to understand the theory of measuring stuff like this, but to physically build the equipment and take the measurement is wild
Sorry for the late reply. No we don't make stuff with atomic level precision (that would require AFM/SPM and is very tedious I imagine. Frabrication is mostly lithography so nothing new. What I was refering to is using TEM as a QC tool especially when combine with FIB to create cross-section to analyse interfaces of thin-films.
Loved your real-world explanation examples, thank you for taking the time to construct them. Made the rest relatively easy to understand. Fascinating equipment and process. Your work takes a lot of patience. Thanks again.
Thank you so much for doing this. I wanted to do science when I was a kid, but I missed my chance. I never thought I would have the opportunity to see anything like this, and you gave me a glimpse into what it feels like to be a scientist. Thank you again so much.
Electron microscopes are so incredible. I was able to see one in the flesh when I was a contractor for a chemical plant. Sadly, it was decommissioned prior to when I was there. It was insane just to be in the same room as one. I geek out with tech like that.
7:36 One of my favourite equations in physics - we used to call it "If I do I die" to memorise it (1/f = 1/do + 1/di) took only one round of giggle in the lab to sink it in :) Awesome stuff!
The surprised pikachu face when he demonstrated you can’t shine a light through plywood perfectly conveys my sentiment. I always thought flashlights could shine through walls. My world has been shattered.
together with Applied Science and Cody'sLab, this is now one of my favorite RUclips channels. Awesome explanation, very entertaining and straightforward approach. Thanks!
You should be blown away we can see this stuff. Growing up in the 80s THERE WERE NO COMPUTERS OR CELLPHONES. I was the first person I knew to get a computer and everyone thought I was a nerd. It had 8K ram so a program could only be two pages or the TEXT would fill the ram. I went to computer camp and the sacred 20mb HD was in its own room and we could only look from the doorway. Now my phone has more computing power than was in that entire building. So yes, it is amazing humans can see atoms. We have advanced our technology faster than we are psychologically capable of processing the consequences. This leads to fear and division
I have often wondered how "small we can go" in visualizing our physical world. Young man, you are light years ahead of my mere mortal capability, but your video held my rapt attention. God Bless you and your fine work.
There are about 1 million carbon atoms in the width of a human hair. Take one of those atoms and now make it as big as the observable universe, billions of light years across! crazy right? Now imagine the width of a a small tree trunk say 1m thick inside this universe. This is how small we have managed to get to. This my friend is called 10 to the minus 33cm.
@@str1xt thats the plank length, and it is much smaller than anything we can observe with any instruments. The smallest things we have observed are quarks, 10^-19 meters
The process is amazing. But equally impressive to the subject matter is that I was able to completely follow "Your Presentation" and you made it interesting! I have no background in this and was in fact on YT looking for motorcycle videos when I got distracted by this. Stellar job of explaining such advanced process in understandable everyday language!
Optics is one field of physical science that my brain has trouble understanding, but your explanations made perfect sense. As someone that has studied biochemistry extensively, it is astonishing to visualize the chemistry on an atomic level in real life. I could never do what you do, but thank you for being so good at what you do so that I could experience this.
I have been subbed to so many channels before they get popular. It's always such a pleasure when the channel's content revolves around stem subjects. This channel is phenomenal! I look forward to enjoying the content and seeing the channel climb.
Wow, thank you for sharing this. I like the way how you explain the science in an accessible manner, showing every step of the way and not just jumping to the conclusion. This video in particular taught me a lot about this atomic class of microscopes. I like your other videos too. You make science more accessible to the general public!
This was mind blowing! Incredible! I've always wondered how scientists look at atoms and have never seen a clear, real image of atoms. It's crazy how I never thought about the process of looking at atoms, like how we normally look at things, because they're atoms and we have to use something other than photons. Now I'm really amazed how incredibly difficult and technical it is to look at atoms. These methods are genius. Thank you so much for sharing this amazing footage with us. It's still crazy to think that those are atoms.
Dude, I just gotta say, I have watched this video several times now and it completely blows my mind what you are doing here. Being able to views the actual atoms, It's hard to wrap my head around that. Anyways, your channel is really really great !!
"check it out, atoms" you say so non chalantly lol. These videos are so cool even though I understand about 30% of whats going on, I still learn something everytime I watch. The way you explained the camera perspective of how the atoms were being viewed and how you have to angle the sample to line the atoms up so you can see through the gaps makes so much sense, and at the same time completely blew my mind
6:49 the concept of clarity - of the images- was explained by others in other videos. But the difference here is the example you showed with those small balls that mimic atoms and how the image was blurred and later how you got a clear image . Now it makes sense. YOU have done a feynmann job of explaining things in an interesting manner. Tq
Even withing atoms. Aren't atoms themselves like 90% empty space? Cuz it's kinda like the orbit of the moon to the Earth is like the electron around the nucleus, kinda thing
@@mihailmilev9909 Yeah, I was wondering what constitutes 'an atom'. Is what we are seeing the electron shell or a derived virtual image. I was hoping to see the nucleus in there.
Very nice job ! Nice to see some good science happening on yt ! I used a very old samsung TEM few years ago to look at some protein fibers, this bring back some memories
Thank you for this, such a beautiful presentation of those crystalline structures, true microscopy - it was a joy watching the whole video and paying attention to all the stuff you did.
Hey everybody! comments, corrections, and FAQs here:
1) Go check out reddit.com/r/trytryagain, there are a bunch of posts now and it's great!
2) Thanks to Kunal and Aidan for previewing this video and making sure I wasn't too egregiously wrong in my explanations! Kunal wanted to add that for TEM and STEM imaging, the vast majority of the time the sample isn't pointed "at the beam" - normally it's at a wonky angle to produce very specific diffraction effects. This lets us do some cool things, like look at strain fields from dislocations, but I didn't do that in this video. Also because of diffraction effects, by the time you've zoomed all the way into atoms, the "shadow" analogy is actually pretty terrible, and image formation is complicated (hence switching to STEM). Aidan had some comments on STEM-vs-TEM, notably that despite the beam paths being completely different, they actually DO interact with the sample in largely the same way and produce similar contrast when you aren't at atomic resolution. When I said they were mechanistically completely different, that was accurate from the perspective of the mechanics of the microscope being different, but the beam-sample interaction physics is EXTREMELY similar.
2 (TLDR) I swept a lot under the rug in order to focus exclusively on atomic-resolution microscopy - Diffraction and strain contrast microscopy is arguably a lot more important, certainly more common, but also a LOT more complicated.
3) I've got t-shirts for sale! If you ever wanted to have a t-shirt with a giant red flaming alpha on the front - NOW YOU CAN… alphaphoenix.creator-spring.com/
4) If anybody's super-curious, here's the paper we published: doi: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.cgd.2c00188 unfortunately it's not on SciHub yet, but if you check back in a couple days I should have a link to the manuscript available!
5) I’ve had a lot of people ask about the drift - yes the sample is rigidly mounted, and yes the beam keeps pointing in the same direction, but when was the last time you tried to hold something so still that it didn’t move by an atom? Thermal expansion and contraction is actually a huge problem - if the sample stage is warmer than the microscope, when you load it in, the arm that holds the sample is going to cool down and contract - super slowly - for a couple hours minimum, and that’s enough to ruin long exposure pictures with crazy rolling shutter artifacts.
6) a few people have mentioned the mask and while I think most of these commenters are just being irritants because they can, it actually brings up a very interesting point about these scopes. To reduce noise, vibration, and changes in temperature, the room that houses this microscope is designed to have almost zero air changeover. This is fantastic for consistent microscope operation, but real bad to leave an airborne virus in a room and have somebody else walk into the same air a few minutes later.
7) I did some math and changed the title from 10000000x magnification to 50000000x magnification (eh - same order of magnitude). magnification is very poorly-defined because it technically depends on the viewing screen. There IS a "standard" display size from when all TEM images were published on paper in the same journal format, but I don't remember the size, so I took one of the shots where I was focusing with a field of view of a little over 4 nanometers and assumed it was 8-10 inches tall on the monitor, then rounded nicely. according to the manufacturer's site, the magnification goes up to 230M - again, not sure what the intended display size is. I wonder if they ship computer monitors with the microscope???
8) I'm sure there are more things wrong or fuzzy so complain away and I'll add notes here!
how did you comment before the video was released?
also first
Why is all that focusing lenses process done by hand? It looks like it could be done by some software itself using either sensors or IA to detect patterns on the image
@@NOT_A_ROBOT He probably released the video as privat first. Then he could comment on it, and then release it as public.
@@caam0000 ok thanks lol
Are you making “clean” semi-conductor?
It’s insane that this kind of technology can be used and showcased to potentially millions of people all by one guy.
Of millions, who else is so cool to do so? One in a billion.....
There are so many cool things in the world, and I wish everybody passionate about their field had the chance to share. I’ve been so shocked at the reception to these videos over the last year on what I thought were super-obscure topics, and it just reinforces the old Feynman quote that “everything in interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” Keep being curious everybody!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel "...everything IS interesting..."
Great video. Really sparked my curiosity!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel your shirts are sold out in my size :(
Indeed, but the catch is that a third of the people will likely call it evil because of the fact that the earth is flat.
(How can I convey a tone of sarcasm through text?)
I remember growing up not too long ago where in science classes we were told that an atom has never been photographed and now it’s so exciting that we finally have
Really? When was that?
@@QianyiLi-bi7jli remember about 10 or so years ago there was big talk about scientists releasing first footage of atoms and it wasn’t even this good. Before that, it was like OC said. We are literally among wizards tricking rocks into thinking for us
bro it's not a photograph of an atom it's a photograph of an chemical combination
@@alex7422 womp womp
@@QianyiLi-bi7jlnot the OP, but pre-2008 at the very minimum. If we wanted to say a computer assisted way, probably pre-1996. That’s just a guesstimate
That is an absolutely stunning machine, and an equally stunning capture! Well done!
I mean, yeah, it's cool and all, but does it run Doom?
Hello, random checkmark, hope you have a good day
@@ronjoe6292 I mean it's a semiconductor so probably
What is funny here is that I am currently employed at a factory that makes these things. And I find it cool that I understand some of the things he is showing on screen, purely from the setup and assembly perspective.
My man eyeing off his next lab toy 👁🫦👁
please never lose your curiosity - such people like you move humanity forward and give us hope in the future 👍
Hope for the future, absolutely, he's not a politician.....................
@@TheRoland444 He could be. I would love for more scientists to go into politics.
I used to think I was pretty smart. Then I realized that someone had to create this machine and that knocked me down a few pegs. This guy did a great job dumbing it down for me and is a natural educator.
Doesn't mean "you are not smart" or "less smart".
Much of this type of work is by trail and error. And persuing an idea, refining it and slowly zoning into something that works.
Probably this machine hasn't been conceptualized "by a single person" and "by just sitting at the desk and started drawing". It's usually rigorous effort and endurance, persistence.
And usually it's also a hyper focussed ability to a very niche or small detaillistic branch of study or applied studies.
All it takes is "bringing your above your intellect that is above average in your surroundings", into a situation where it becomes average ("peers") or below average ("mentors"). And start doing things and keep putting in the work. And perhaps one day you'll get a spark of inspiration, or grow into expertise in one or another thing. And realize how far you have grown and come compared to where you were before.
If you feel "you are smarter as those around you", you can either try to get into a context where you can apply this. Or you can mentor those you notice are not "so bright as yourself".
It's never too late. There will be always someone more intelligent as you, from a little bit to lightyears ahead. But the reverse is also true: there will be always people much less intelligent as yourself.
@@popytkpisatel Well said. I like the perspective of "mentors, teachers and peers" as a way of referring to people, as opposed to "smart and stupid".
machine like that is the result of decades of ENTIRE CULTURES working through tiny increases. millions of people to get a machine like that, even the grunts digging ditches for materials are part of the process. it's not ONE person, ever was. even one person needs to go to school for years learning what many people passed down through generations. no one is an island, no one. humans are powerful because we can cooperate and specialize. you could say none of this is possible without farming. without farming we all go back to hunter gatherers.
The SEM operators at AT&T , Bell Laboratories only had high school educations . Your not dumb , would only need 90 days training . Least wise , that’s what the union IBEW allowed to qualify for that job classification .
ITS NOT THAT COMPLICATED BRO YOU COULD DO IT
This is amazing. Is there not an ability to save all values to “re-find” a specific spot on a specific orientation of the sample or is it way more complicated than that?
There are lots of automated return-to-spot and autofocus and stuff like that, but for research level stuff I never trusted them lol. Once I got help on one of the newer SEMs for some problem or another and somebody pressed the “auto contrast and brightness” button and it did a startlingly good job - I was stunned! If you were in a production environment checking a lot of samples for the same thing it’d be a no-brainer.
Granted in this case “next to the white dot” probably could have been EASILY solved with the save location feature, I just never bothered to learn to use it… I don’t think it could save tilts also, only x-y-z coordinates, but that may be wrong, and considering that the sample was pretty warped, you need to tilt differently at different spots so it’s SLIGHTLY more complicated.
On a completely separate note, how do you guys feel about the Chronos 2.1? I just turned ads on on my (hobby) channel for the first time and slomo capability beyond my phone’s 240fps is a primary goal of that. Anything else (less than a phantom) you’d recommend 😂? Big fan of your guys’ stuff!!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Is it possible to set the microscope to scan autonomously?
I was wondering if it is possible, using a mix of auto-focus, image processing and scripting, to capture high fidelity images of whole samples. Then use some funky image processing to pick out interesting spots.
Like you said, because it is for research you may not trust this sort of stuff/may not use the machine for a purpose that requires messing around with any programmable functions it may have in order to analyse whole samples.
I’d really love to have a play with one of these, it looks like a lot of (tedious) fun. I’m afraid my pocket money may not cover it though…
@@krishyfishy1 I'm not a scientist but as a software engineer I think machine learning could be used to combine multiple exposures, denoise the image, and even auto-detect irregularities, if you had enough samples to train it with.
@@krishyfishy1 In theory, yes. In practice, the challenge of the autofocus is twofold.
First is that if it fails, the microscope (which is very expensive) spends a lot of time capturing terrible images. If you have a (relatively cheap) scientist doing the searching, then you can save a lot of money.
The second is that every material that you try to image will look different when focussing. I work with cryo-bio samples, and they are VERY different under the STEM. The same ML program wouldn't work for both types of materials.
Now, I work with a system called ptychography, where we collect very defocussed diffraction images at each point in a STEM scan, so each pixel of that image contains another full image of data, and a slight change in focus is a lot less important there so you only have to correct the other issues in the microscope. The problem is that you need to computationally reconstruct the image, which takes a lot of compute.
@@ryanmccampbell7 It's true that with ML you can do denoising. In fact, we do! But you can't get more information out of an image than the electrons originally carried. Also, the kinds of irregularities that we are looking for look different on every sample, so by the time you have your training set, it isn't as worth doing.
What a spectacular video. I recall Ben Krasnow once commenting about how capturing the initial joy and wonder of scientific discovery in a RUclips video is extremely difficult, but you’ve done a wonderful job of that here, as well as giving excellent explanations as to how it all works. Well done
Ben’s channel is awesome!
One of the most incredible machines ever. The engineering involved to achieve this is unprecedented. Wonderful video and explanation.
Wow... at 70 years old, I'm absolutely and totally off the scale awestruck. Thank you so much for all of the time and effort you did in producing this video and the excellent explanations.
I'm 27 and honestly the feeling is no different. The engineering that must've gone into this, built upon the collective knowledge gathered over the course of centuries, to produce a machine that can image _atoms_ is simply unbelievable. Tell that to someone a hundred years ago and they'd look at you confused, and ask you what you've been smoking. It's all magic to me. Hats off to the many boffins who worked to put this together, and incredible what can be achieved when people work together toward a common goal.
@@Zappygunshot I honestly didn't belive it when I first heard of it. But I actually see how it works. And it's crazy that with just a relatively few images you can actually show the scale of atoms now.
I'm with you on awestruck.
I've been involved with science for a looong time but this latest technology still blows me away.
"How do they do that?"
56 here and blown away.
51 here. I can't imagine the emotions reverberating from this find, but its got to be at the slated tipping point.
Something that always blows my mind is the engineering that goes in to different scientific instrumentation. Those instruments are the culmination of thousands upon thousands of hours of work from many different people. Years of work before you can even start to do your work.
Shoulders of giants
@@lezliewhicker8450
Thank you, Going through her profile in her webpage, she smashed all her state certificate and accreditation🙏
Dont forget all the years of evolution that had to take place so we can see this now..
For me one of the most attractive aspects of physics is creating new tools for other scientists and engineers to use. There are many scientific groups pushing boundaries of tools to open up new fields of science to extract a bit of knowledge about something.
Examples:
Shortest light pulses - so called attosecond lasers - let us study fundamental physical processes (Phyiscs Nobel Price 2023)
Highest power lasers - so called petawatt lasers - open new avenues of accelerating particles or doing nuclear science and many other things
STED microscopes - pushing the resolution for optical microscopes below 100nm
These are the ones I am somewhat familiar with but there are many others. Some try to cool atoms to lowest temperatures, other to create pulse light at very short wavelengths (x-ray). Not everything becomes a device that you put in your lab, but for example the STED microscope did.
@@seesritual8990 don't forget the 13 billion or even more years of emergence as a process to took hold to reach this level of complexity
Extremely cool to see the entire process. I've seen the output images in papers and science reporting, but it's refreshing to see the entire (cumbersome) process leading up to such results.
Cumbersome process are the bread and butter of anything computer related... 3D models look cool and have lots of information, but only after someone, or entire groups of someones, spend days and weeks and months putting the models together and debugging them. I have been that someone.... and it was pretty fun. Lol
It's refreshing. A lot of refreshing.
@@dominikwacawik4778 lmfaoooo
@@kindlin that's true, thank u for yoir service o7
I worked for the DOE for a few years and ran an EB (electron beam) welder. Very different but but this video brought back some memories. Also my uncle ran an Electron Microscope and analyzed samples from Ground Zero for asbestos. Unfortunately he passed a few years ago from mesothelioma but he would take us kids to his lab and show us all kinds of cool things. My fav part was playing with liquid Nitrogen lol. Anyways thanks for bringing back such great memories ❤
This is awesome.
I get really excited over crystals… the bizarrely mathematical order that falls out of random giggling is unfathomably beautiful. (I think you have a similar feeling about laminar flow 😁)
It’s really cool how you can look at the (admittedly complex) math for how particles work, and it’s so simple compared to the millions or billions or more of phenomena that arise from the same math.
Atoms all follow the same rules, but they interact in so many different ways.
It's funny how nonchalantly he states "oh look, atoms!" I found myself holding my breath while looking at the pictures. I think it's simultaneously exciting and terrifying to see the building blocks of our universe.
46 likes bruh
And no I'm not trying to make a chain I hate those
the way you overlap the results you see from theoretical explanation to the real world almost seamlessly really should be what every academic institution should strive to do when teaching these concepts. I've always loved being able to see an explanation like this and I strive to demonstrate it whenever I teach as well. It strikes an incredible chord between seeing tangible results to what seem like abstract concepts at first, as well as imparting a true sense of wonder for the universe. If this doesn't get you excited about science then nothing will! Stunning video as always
I completely rearranged the first half of this video a few times… and I really liked how it settled with the light shadow image being cut to the electron shadow, and then doing it again with the scanning. Glad you liked it!
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel The light shadow example was hugely helpful. One thing that might improve it would be to have a camera recording as your laser scans the ping pong balls against the cardboard, then composite the frames from the recording over each other to demonstrate the blurriness / clarity depending on the beam size and shape. Not sure if that would be more or less tedious than hand drawing the dots on a sheet of graph paper 😂
What strikes me is the opposite - that while now we as humans have such amazing technology that allows imaging nano-scales, seeing submicrosecond processes (high-speed cameras), recording picosecond electrical perturbations (oscilloscopes), for the largest part of the scientific history scientists had to do with only the most basic of instruments, and had to develop and imagine complex concepts completely in their head. Like, for example, the idea that a capacitor and inductor can create electrical oscillations was proposed well before the invention of the oscilloscopes just on the basis of the observation that the residual charge on a capacitor after a discharge is sometimes positive, and sometimes negative. And the whole theory of atomic structure was developed based on x-ray diffraction patterns, which do not directly image anything particular at all (they appear in an inverted space). The broadness of human mind is just stunning. Just wanted to add my two cents here
I think you are one of the few people who actually shows the entire process when you do a video like this, and not just the flashy parts.
That’s incredibly badass. I knew advanced electron microscopes were around, but showing us the magnetic lenses, the impressive sample aperture, well... Really great job explaining each step with enough detail to be appreciated! It’s incredible engineering, ambitious objectives, and a mind-blowing achievement, and you did a great job conveying a ton of info in a brief time. Thanks for the video, and congratulations on finding the phenomenon! And a paper! Nice!
the BIG question is what are the atoms made of? does an atom have a nucleus?
@@kratoleaf7619 Yes, atoms have a nucleus. We know quite a lot about atomic nuclei since at least the 1960ies. In fact we know the constituent parts of the constituent parts of atomic nuclei. We can also create artificial atomic nuclei that do not occur in nature (since decades). We can even manipulate atomic nuclei (it is somewhat tedious though) - that field is called "nuclear chemistry".
Here is a "map" of all atomic nuclei currently know (natural and artificial ones): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides
To think that 2-3 decades ago, most of the public would never even know about machines like this, let alone see them work their magic.
Further back than that, 2-3 decades back this was well known
In fact most of the public still know nothing about machines like this since they are not interested. This is why this particular video has 80k views while Shakira regularly gets 100M+. Sadly.
The first "lens" to focus electromagnetic radiation was made by a German scientist named Hans Busch in 1926.
The so-called "Übermikroskop" was subsequently invented by Ruska and Knoll also in Germany by 1931.
Here is how that turned out by 1949 built by Siemens: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Elektronenmikroskop.UeM100.Ernst.Ruska.TU-Berlin.jpg
It looks like something out of a mad scientist's lab.
I work with the Talos regularly and I bet you, its just amazing.
TEM is in fact a quite old innovation, dates back to WW2. You can check the dates from wikipedia. STEM is whole another story, modern computing power makes it possible.
You've taken me back to when I was doing my PhD! Hours upon hours upon hours on an SEM, trying to find particular weld defects or characterising fracture surfaces (I think I got a little triggered when you mentioned "stig", lol).
You really communicated well that elation you get when, after god knows how many hours and how many samples, you find exactly the feature you were looking for, and you know you've gone from something purely theoretical to something with actual evidence behind it. I also got super pumped when that happened!
Neat stuff! I can't believe you can make the equivalent of an optical quality lens with magnetic fields. I'd be interested to learn more about how those rings are tuned and controlled.
I don’t know exactly how the fields are constructed, but in terms of precision, magnetic lenses are apparently absolutely atrocious. I’ve heard the analogy that all TEM is like looking through a coke bottle bottom instead of a microscope objective. “Aberration corrected” scopes add a few hundred thousand dollars to the cost of the scope, and are crazy impressive, but they still don’t even begin to approach the theoretical resolution limit we should be able to hit with electrons. If somebody figures out that coil geometry it’ll be pretty incredible!
Happy to see you here - glad you enjoyed the video! I’ve been thinking about a miniature vortex shooter for a long time - especially if it could capture and carry a separate gas. In your vortex cannon experiments did you notice any trends that produced consistently faster of slower vortex rings? I don’t know if the tiny-but-super-fast vortex ring I’ve been imagining has ANY foundation in reality.
Also your stoichiometric hydrogen burner is terrifying 😂
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel That's interesting! I like hearing when already impressive tech has known areas that could be massively improved.
My vortex cannon is pretty much reliant on pure brute force. I haven't played much with the geometry, I just try to nail the best gas mix for a proper bang. The shape is modeled after hail cannons. I've tried constructing little versions with metal cones made for baking cream horns, but no success yet. Actually the smallest and most impressive vortex ring launcher I discovered by accident. I had a hollow plastic wiffle ball bat in a swimming pool and the base of the handle had about a 5mm hole in it. When the bat was full of water if you tapped it on the bottom of the pool it launched a dime size water vortex with enough force to fire clear out of the water and several feet into the air. Not sure if you could get the same power out of a tiny gas filled chamber, but maybe with a high power acoustic driver.
Wow that sounds real weird (and awesome!)
I wonder if the incompressibility of water makes it persist better?
He's exactly right that TEM lenses are terrible in comparison to optical. Because the aberrations are so bad, you need to keep the numerical aperture tiny. It's the *very* tiny wavelength (2.51 pm for 200 keV electrons) that saves you.
Oh yeah, Gravitational lensing. That's space talk!
Its incredibly difficult to wrap my brain around how we can even fathom seeing something so small. Incredible
Now, to really blow your mind, ponder for a minute the fact that we truly cannot even begin to fathom the true scale of the universe, simply because we cannot see it from the same kind of perspective that this one human does of this tiny sample. (There are building blocks to atoms that are smaller yet...who knows how small it goes?)
Then consider the possiblity that we are akin to tiny little parasites sitting on what might amount to one of those atoms, and unbeknownst to us we are basically like bacteria in the gut of an insanely huge being and all the stars we can see are just the building blocks of say, some cells in a stomach. We can't see or detect the rest of the universe because of the limited scope of our existence much as bacteria in our gut cannot see or fathom beyond what is right next to it- it doesnt even know it is in the gut of another being.
Makes ya feel smal thinking of it like that.
Thats what she said
@@ElevatedLevetatorto you
@@jack2u about you
@@ElevatedLevetatorkid
This man just tricked us into watching him research for a paper. But I'm all for it. It still blows my mind that this technology exists.
PhD candidate in chemistry on his last year here. I have a couple years experience of electron imaging under my belt, and I gotta say, you did a fantastic job with this video! It's always insanely difficult to get people to appreciate the work behind these kinds of images unless they themselves have done some sort of work with sensitive instruments like these. Holding your hands up off the table both in optimistic superstition and to give yourself the best chance not to slightly bump the table and throw the image off, the "still a lil bit of stig" comment after a WHOLE lot of focusing, using VESTA to visually explain concepts, using Velox as opposed to Esprit (that's a personal thing - I hate Esprit). It's so clear that you have done a lot of work in this field, yet you still show those little OCD tendencies that microscopists (or any scientist on this small a scale) usually do and should have. It shows you're still learning and want to improve. It shows you wanted this video to be as comprehensive as possible, and I can only imagine the time it took to edit it all together, as well as the risk you took of filming live research when you could've come up empty-handed. Kudos to you; please take my subscribe.
I have known about the science and technology behind STEM since IBM discovered it, and a few Nobel Prizes were awarded. It is incredibly time consuming. Imagine looking for a dime on a football field. Some images would take a few days to focus, and a week or two to image process.
This is a brilliant explanation.
I think the reason why this type of work is less appreciated, is because everybody knew that the misalignment was there for sure. They just needed someone to prove it with the right tools.
@@denielalain5701
Well, I actually went looking for coins on a football field, and I found a dime, after about 4 hours. Total crazy.
I am material science master student and that was indeed a really nice and innovative way to present such a capable and high-tech apparatus.
@@joeturner7959 IBM did not discover it. IBM developed it.
I work at Thermo Fisher Scientific (the maker of this particular microscope) on these microscopes; including the Talos and the Velox application as seen in the video. It's great to see our microcopes used in the wild like this.
You have some nice microscopes! We have a Helios G4UX - really a great tool allowing for some great results! At least until theres something to be fixed. But your technicians are also really good.
Wizardry!
@@Vysair Just a bunch of people that really love technology coming together to build things like this
So of you make it to management is it considered a good thing to be a "micro-manager"? Ba-dum-tis, I'll show myself out.
@@olliefoxx7165 LOL
My friend, this is probably the coolest video I have ever seen. Thank you so much for taking us on this journey, and congratulations on your discovery!
I cant even comprehend how small that sample is, it must be so finnicky to move
Yeah it can be. The microscope holder is really precise, but when you're viewing at that high of a magnification even "really precise" can feel challenging. In my experience the trickiest part is tilting the sample to zone axis. One of the tilt directions is designed to be eucentric when you're in focus (i.e. the image of the sample doesn't move laterally while you're tilting in that direction), but the other direction is not, so every time you make a tilt adjustment in that direction the image in your field of view changes completely. Very frustrating if you're doing something like this where you're trying to look at one particular feature of interest.
Handling the sample outside of the microscope can also be a bit tricky, but it's really not so bad if you're patient and make sure not to suck the thin bit off your sample with the vacuum tweezers.
Reminds me a lot of using a telescope to focus on a single object in the sky. So much as blow on it wrong and you throw off alignment.
It's really tough. I tend to not drink caffeine or any other stimulants on days that I'll be handling materials. Really though, we have protocols that give us a checklist. We have to progress through the checklist which allows for a lot of focus and clarity.
"I'm going to be looking for a specific thing, and I'm not sure I'll find it, but I'll still learn something" is the most sciencest science thing any scientist has ever scienced.
FOR REAL
That's all science is about bebey
And it's fun, and how people should be towards things they don't know in life
He scienced the science out of of it, for sure.
Thats a lot of science
I do astrophotography and I share you’re amazement that we have the technology to see the very large/far away and the very small. It’s like prying secrets out of reality that we humans aren’t supposed to see.
can we use this to see viruses?
Viruses is way too big for this type of Microscopic Scanners
Yes and no, TEM as explained in the video it's used to cast a shadow in an extreme vacuum. This vacuum destroys organic matter by boiling any liquid off. To image bio material a special machine cryoTEM is developed. This freezes any materials to prevent it from boiling and moving. This invention was awarded the Nobel price is 2017. Source: I developed the firmware for these machines
@@ocelot667 And you would usually use a SEM and not a TEM.
Yes
18:30 I relate to this thought so much!
After spending thousands of hours in front of an SEM looking at mostly features within the 10nm-150um range, I feel as if you just pulled back the curtain to what Ive always wanted to experience - to see actual atoms. This was truly delightful to see!
I work with a TEM at a local hospital to take micrographs of tissue for the pathology department. All of electron microscopy is extremely complex and delicate. I have had samples literally just fly away because of a change in room pressure from opening a door. We use microtomy to get the samples to the appropriate thickness and use heavy metal stain to render a beautiful live image.
With your TEM, How do you separate or isolate a specific or individual virus from the surrounding tissue and other bodily fluids ? Or is that even possible ?
@@michaeltaylors2456 I work normally with clinical tissue specimens. Here, we are almost never looking for viruses, but rather abnormalities (disease) in tissues. Some research cases come in and they are looking for viruses, but those are already submitted to me in an aqueous solution from the PI. I am sure there is a standard (and probably even simple) protocol to separate viruses from tissue via cell lysis, etc. There is, however, very particular protocols that must be followed to view viruses under the TEM that greatly differ from those for clinical specimens. I think that this is a question better suited for Med Techs, Histo Techs, and Research Scientists. Hope this helps a little!
@@Sam-gu1wm Yes it did, thank you so much
Can I know what you majored in to get to this job , is it microbiology?
wow, you really believe these are atoms??
17:16 this is truly amazing… I never thought I’d live to see the day where atoms could be visualized in their natural form.
I don't know how old you are, but imaging individual atoms was probably possible throughout the majority of your lifetime. The field ion microscope was invented in 1951 and was to my knowledge one of the first microscopy techniques with atomic resolution. In 1970, it was first demonstrated that STEM can image individual atoms as well. And since the 90ies there is a wealth of scanning probe techniques available (STM, AFM, ...) which have featured atomic resolution right from the start. We've been there all along :)
Ironically right?
You were most likely born long after this was possible
you believe this nonsense? there are no atoms.
Gen-Z spotted
I design electron microscope rooms for low noise and vibration and this video gives me a deeper appreciation for these amazing instruments and the scientists who use them!
What are some examples of how you engineer for that?
@@mikejrSAA Usually involves "room within room" construction for sound isolation and isolated slabs for vibration control depending on site conditions and what else is in the building. Architectural space layouts for the microscopy suite also need to be carefully designed since there's a lot of support equipment and operators may need to be in separate rooms to not disturb the microscope. Basically an integrated design that involves the structural engineer, architect, and mechanical/electrical/plumbing engineers all considering acoustics and vibration along with everything else.
What an absolute joy to be able to come along for the ride with you on this journey! A sort of digital bring your kids to work day..😂
your physical examples are amazing and brilliantly thought out, especially using the gimbal and laser to explain scanning. That looks like it took an eternity to set up, film, and edit, but it was extremely effective at explaining the principal
right!? and how he did it without extra words! so damn concise! loved it :)
the BIG question is what are the atoms made of? does an atom have a nucleus?
This makes me think about those who had none of the info we had now. No hypothesis, no images, and no life study from peers, but they still figured the shapes and functions out. They had theoretical models created and started decoding the mystery of something no one really even knew existed. Mind-blowing.
Indeed!
Because the history you've been taught is NONSENSE. You LOSE information post cataclysm not gain it
Well to be fair they were the ones who set up the scientific method with their questions and actions and records!
@@hisnameisiam808 Sure thing
The info was known and lost in a reset
Damn. I have trouble sometimes with small print, and here you are not reading the print, but instead looking at home the ink melds into the paper (so to speak).
I'm glad people like you exist because it pushes our understanding what is going on in the super small environment of atoms. Hats off to you..
I started working with my schools TEM and SEM recently for my undergrad research. It has been an incredible experience, and I just love working with these machines! Since I started my research, I’ve never felt more excited about science and technology than I am now!
As a SEM operator, i admire your work in this video. And the joy that you feel when going from the large shot to fine details never gets old :-)
I like how the decorators thought that, after hours of staring at grainy grey grid like things, what you really want to see when you look away... is more grey grid like things.
So those are actually huge radiators/air vents that keep the room all one temperature without basically any air exchange. If this was a higher resolution scope I wouldn’t even be able to be in the room while it was running. Aberration-corrected scopes are almost always driven remotely so the operator’s body heat and breathing aren’t a problem
So I guess the answer is that many different applications of science result in gray, grid-like things, haha 😂
@@miriamlewis3413 some say even our own universe is a grey blob on an enormous grid.
@@drworm5007 interesting....
@@drworm5007 like who, where?
You're a truly excellent educator, I'm not a materials scientist, but I am involved with the field of machine/artificial cognition (not "AI") . If we had even half the level of quality of this content in our field, I truly believe we'd be significantly further ahead in bringing people into what we're doing as well. Massive well done, thank you so much for sharing your expertise so freely & in such an accessible form here!!
No I think more people would be interested in furthering computer technology if it wasn't being used against us to put us in an Orwellian dystopia
I feel like this is one of those fields of study where you can get so lost in what you're doing that you pay little mind to what you're *actually* doing. This is to say, doing all the focusing and imaging is a tedious task that requires a bunch of effort and focus, which just serves to distract from the fact that what's happening in a more literal sense is that a car-sized machine is being used to examine features on an object so incomprehensibly tiny. What you're doing is tantamount to witchcraft, with the limitations of the machine not only being down to quality, but also due to butting up against the very physical laws of the universe. This is all to say that this is one of those things that the more you describe it, the crazier it gets. But, somehow, this insanity is so normalized that you can say "Look! Atoms!" without losing your head.
It's all fun for starting years as an Electron microscopy operator/Engineer, specially TEM..But it gets boring and tiring with time.Patience is main thing in electron microscopy..
Once upon a time, December 1989, I was sitting on a transPacific flight chatting with an engineer discussing a possible gimbal design for that sample holder.
Very cool to see a one in real life rather than sketched on paper, and fantasies of verbal imagination!
Fantastic video! Your demonstrations made this a highly educational and accessible video, even if they are imperfect representations. It makes me happy that your institution is willing to let you publish videos created using their facilities. Another benefit is video evidence to your supervisor that you were hard at work all that time.
I feel your pain at spending hours fiddling with settings in front of a microscope, although my own experience was with fluorescent microscopy and molecular genetics. I still remember my excitement the first time I was able to see the expression of two different proteins at the 8 cell stage during nematode development using GFP and RFP tagged proteins.
This video fills me with some level of existential dread that is hard to comprehend.
absolutely mind-blowing. 11:46 also tripped me out when I first saw his hands flickering
Same.
I love how when the first pics of atoms came out everyone was super stoked just like when the first black hole photos came out, but now it just seems like a tedious desk job. Still amazing, but the march of progress seems to humble even the most amazing things.
Agree regarding progress in image processing, not so much on the faulty attribution that an AGN, or anything, is a black hole. Astrophysics is riddled with confirmation bias and bad science, but the imaging methods can be celebrated.
@@Infinion what is it then? And what other biases is it riddled with?
Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond my control, I never finished high school. The way you explained what you were doing is so incredible, that even I, tottaly understood it. Amazing!
I dont think we would have ever learned anything like this even if we stayed in school all the way through
"beyond my control" aka I'm too much of a pussy to take accountability.
@@titanzx6 correction,American School*
School loses its value after 8-9th grade in my opinion. After that, it seems like it's more about dealing with a workload than it's about learning.
My point is I don't think not finishing high school would've changed how much of this video you understood
@@wayneparkinson4558maybe I misinterpreted your comment..... I can't speak for all "drop outs" but in my case, it was a necessity. Regardless, without spending a single day in high school, I managed to learn how to speak and write in 3 languages, have my own buisness for 20 years in which I provided a future for over 20 families, own my home, my "toys" and be semi retired at 50. It's the desire to learn, and become something, and no school can give you that.
Hey, love your videos! As a microscopy guy, I was impressed with how well an electrical engineer can understand optics!! ;) Notice the key to getting a well-formed image on your screen is that the position of the ball bearings is a little bit /farther/ than the focal length of the lens, but less than double that distance, as anything beyond 2f would de-magnify, rather than magnify your image. The screen will only have a sharp image projected on it in one location with a fixed position of the ball bearings. Moving the screen back farther will only blur the image. You can change the magnification by bringing L2 closer (increase magnification) or move L2 farther away (reduce magnification) and repositioning the screen accordingly (noting you cannot bring the bearings closer to the lens than its focal length since no image will be formed at all past this point). The flashlight and pinhole are now serving merely as illumination of the ball bearings and are no longer taking part in image formation. They set up you ideal "object" to be imaged, which is light passing through gaps in the ball bearings, and L2 is just projecting an image of that onto your screen! You can confirm this by moving lens 1 out of position so the light is no longer perfectly collimated and you'll still see the sharp edges of the ball bearings at your screen just as before, only now you will probably notice the image gets darker towards the edges. Similarly, you could replace L1 with another lens of a different focal length and the size and quality of your resulting image will be identical because L2 does all the work. That narrowing of the beam of light you see is happening right at L2's focal length (assuming L1 is collimating perfectly). This is the image of the pinhole created by the combination of L1 and L2. L1 collimates the light, and L2 focuses it again, creating an image at a distance equal to its focal length. Many microscopes use collimation in their imaging and illumination systems, because the part of the optical path between L1 and L2 can be made as long or short as you like and it doesn't change the outcome very much. You can also stick all sorts of filters or optics in the light path here without affecting the image quality, which cannot be said for putting optics in a converging or diverging path.
It's not often I watch a 20 minute video all the way through, but I was literally leaning forward on the edge of my seat, rooting for you to find what you were looking for so I could see it too. Thanks for posting this, and I'm glad I just found your channel. Existence is fascinating!
it's called ADHD.
I've never seen how a scanning microscope works, and with this video you ABSOLUTELY nailed how to explain it!
This is one of the best and most enthusiastic (actual) science videos I've ever seen! Kudos!
Awesome stuff! When I read the title I thought we'd be seeing AFM or Scanning *Tunneling* EM, but I'd never heard of this method, cool! I actually do molecular bio, so our sample preparation is hilariously different from a materials scientist's, but still really nice to know at least a basis of what you're explaining 💪
People definitely do cryo-TEM to image proteins and stuff, although the sample handling to make that work sounds like an incredible pain in the ass to me.
@@realityChemist I’ve seen people in the prep room flash freezing stuff for cryo tem before. Always looked like a real pain!
Edit: nitrogen everywhere!
this is my crystallography university semester course in one 20 minute video! well done and well explained!
wow, the green graphic overlay describing the focus/process was really a eureka moment for me. thanks so much for being so creative in describing an insane process we take for granted.
I used to study ultrathin biological samples with electron microscopes 35 years ago. We couldn't go down to atomic level, just to the size of intracellular structures, but the process was very similar to what you have presented, and it was sometimes quite nerve-wracking to set the focus and everything right. At that time only a very few really powerful microscopes were able to see the the outline of atoms. Since then, there's been a great leap forward in technology. Keep on with the good work!👍
The microscope knows where the atoms are at all times. It know this, because it knows where the atoms aren't. By subtracting where the atom is, from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or, deviation...
Absolutely fascinating to see an actual picture of the building blocks of our world, it really puts things in perspective when you realize that no matter how different everything in this world may look, when we break it down and look deep enough everything is made of these building blocks. Awesome video my friend, also you have amazing patience lol, I get frustrated when it takes more than 10 seconds for my phone to focus on something I'm trying to photograph, I can't imagine having to concentrate for hours to get the beam lined up with the sample and the sample lined up with the beam. Your channel is criminally underrated, if I had science teachers showing me things like this back when I was in school than it prob wouldn't have taken me until my late 20s early 30s to really take a deep interest in science.
NOT "actual pictures". The images were constructed by the machine. Things that small have no appearance and so we can't make pictures of them.
Inspiring to see an young guy 2022 talking "science" at this deeper level ! Please do more. I saw your video with your dad's observatory few years ago. It made be built one for myself.
I did some electron microscopy back when I was at college. We has a TEM, SEM and STEM but I only ever used the scanning electron microscope.
Pretty much everything sees atoms. Very few things can resolve atomic scale though.
Fun fact: your eyes can see atoms too. Only in groups of 10^9+, however.
Electrons touch atoms they don't "see" it like this video title says. Yes I get the gist of it but still electrons aren't em radiation like light
the only thing anyone sees is photons. nice try smart guy.
@@dxb338 does anyone even see anything ? humans have like this GUI that pre-process all information, you are seeing a model of what your brain built to represent what it is seeing.
@@monad_tcp yeah i was gonna go that far but decided to stop at what *eyes* can "see." I mean your visual cortex can be directly stimulated by high energy particles or low energy hits to the head. And then yeah reality tunnels and such. But eyes see photons simple enough for me.
you really explain things in a very easy to understand way. even for someone who even can't remember the little he learned in high school ( me ).. basically knows 0 science - and i am not talking about just this video, your whole channel. you are amazing
I'm so glad he is explaining these things so accessibly but still detailed and getting people excited for these amazing sciences
You’re a really great and thorough teacher who explains things so we can understand if we have no knowledge. Thank you for this video
What a great video, brother.
I used an SEM in grad school for carbon nanotube research, and I can appreciate your frustrations!! I can also appreciate a successful image. There aren’t words that can describe the feeling of getting the image you’re after.
You did a great job describing everything. I love this stuff!!
I’m surprised that there wasn’t more on this done publicly before, I remember recently looking up videos for atoms and all I could find were godawful foreign clickbait channels. I know that atoms have been visualized before with microscopes, but something like this showing the structure and geometry ive never seen before, and as someone who went through their first semester, as a chemistry major (first of eight years), I find this fascinating. I don’t know what else to say besides thank you for showing something incredible like this :)
This is a fake, what you see is a processor matrix and nothing else. Good job for the fan. 🤣
@@zarkadiusz123 Pls explain?
@@zarkadiusz123 elaborate
@@HENERlKO its how the atoms are actually shown, there are imperfections that can be caused by alot of things when observing at an atomic like this, but i think its completely nihilistic for this guy to think that could result in the findings of this video.
@@zarkadiusz123 you are wrong
Could you go into more detail how the refraction patterns help you focus the sample and how they work? I think that could be another great video.
That is a whole can of worms; Williams and Carter have a four-textbook series on TEM, and the entire second book is dedicated to diffraction. I'm sure you could condense it down into a video by throwing out a lot of the details though.
In brief, the Kikuchi lines come in parallel pairs that form Kikuchi bands, and it's possible to follow these bands by tilting the sample to a region where a bunch of them converge into a star-like pattern. That happens at low-order zone axes (think of those as "simple" directions, like looking straight at the face of a cube, straight at one of its edges, straight at a corner, etc). Since low-order axes usually give us the best chance at seeing what we're looking for, we aim for those. This is complicated by the fact that if the sample is very thin (often desirable for STEM), you'll barely see Kikuchi lines, if you see any at all.
There are also the individual diffraction spots (or disks, in STEM mode). Those contain a ton of information and some people do TEM just to look at the diffraction patterns without caring too much about the image. They're also helpful for alignment though, as you when you're near but not on a zone axis they form a sort of partial ring. If you tilt in such a way that the ring closes up toward the center, you'll approach a zone axis.
The best way to ensure you're actually on zone in STEM mode is to collect a PACBED, which is a diffraction image collected while scanning the beam. The way it looks is very sensitive to tilt, and you can usually tell if you're mistilted by just a few milliradians just by looking at it. The downside is that it's an average of everything in your field of view, so if your sample is very bendy it might not accurately represent the tilting of your whole image. When you need to do stuff like map the bending of the sample at atomic res, it's time to switch to 4D STEM
Telescope mirror finishing videos demonstrate and explain the technique with a variety of such patterns. As I understand it they use them to visualize and verify the curvature of the mirror surface.
As a student majoring mechanical engineering in South Korea, this video inspired me a lot. I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for sharing your experience.
i went to school with a guy who worked on one of the early imaging devices that measured the deflection of particles away from a sample. the way he described it, was that it was a sample placed in a circular chamber with a particle gun pointing at it. from what i remember, he was shooting mostly electrons, but they could also shoot alpha, beta, and gamma radiation at the sample. then they had a detection medium that was wrapped around the chamber that housed the sample. they had different methods for detecting different particles, but in general it was a medium that emitted photons when it was excited with electrons. then on the other side of that, they had digital photon detectors all over the place. all put together, it allowed him to take digital data sets of where electrons where going after they were being deflected by a sample. he was a really fascinating guy, and an absolute genius. he was older and had started basically collecting degrees and was working on a masters in CS.
its one thing to understand the theory of measuring stuff like this, but to physically build the equipment and take the measurement is wild
Neat! Sounds like a much more sophisticated Debeye-Scherrer camera, but using particle diffraction instead of x-rays
@@realityChemist Sound like a LEED (low energy electron diffraction) device, maybe a research prototype that could also diffract other particles.
Cool. I'm starting my R&D nanotechnology engineering job next week and this looks exactly like the stuff I'll be doing aside from microfabrication
That's sick, are you there to make stuff with atomic level tolerances or something?
Sorry for the late reply. No we don't make stuff with atomic level precision (that would require AFM/SPM and is very tedious I imagine. Frabrication is mostly lithography so nothing new. What I was refering to is using TEM as a QC tool especially when combine with FIB to create cross-section to analyse interfaces of thin-films.
Loved your real-world explanation examples, thank you for taking the time to construct them. Made the rest relatively easy to understand. Fascinating equipment and process. Your work takes a lot of patience. Thanks again.
Thank you so much for doing this. I wanted to do science when I was a kid, but I missed my chance. I never thought I would have the opportunity to see anything like this, and you gave me a glimpse into what it feels like to be a scientist. Thank you again so much.
Electron microscopes are so incredible. I was able to see one in the flesh when I was a contractor for a chemical plant. Sadly, it was decommissioned prior to when I was there. It was insane just to be in the same room as one. I geek out with tech like that.
7:36 One of my favourite equations in physics - we used to call it "If I do I die" to memorise it (1/f = 1/do + 1/di) took only one round of giggle in the lab to sink it in :)
Awesome stuff!
Thanks👍
2:25 I have never seen a more perfect demonstration of scale.
"Bendy film, piece of junk, who made this?"
It isn't an AlphaPhoenix video without a little bit of self-deprecation
The surprised pikachu face when he demonstrated you can’t shine a light through plywood perfectly conveys my sentiment. I always thought flashlights could shine through walls. My world has been shattered.
What blows my mind the most is how someone made such an instrument/tool. I would love to see the process of building it..
together with Applied Science and Cody'sLab, this is now one of my favorite RUclips channels. Awesome explanation, very entertaining and straightforward approach. Thanks!
You should be blown away we can see this stuff.
Growing up in the 80s THERE WERE NO COMPUTERS OR CELLPHONES.
I was the first person I knew to get a computer and everyone thought I was a nerd. It had 8K ram so a program could only be two pages or the TEXT would fill the ram. I went to computer camp and the sacred 20mb HD was in its own room and we could only look from the doorway.
Now my phone has more computing power than was in that entire building.
So yes, it is amazing humans can see atoms.
We have advanced our technology faster than we are psychologically capable of processing the consequences. This leads to fear and division
It looks so unreal, incredible! I am constantly zooming in and out mentally from different images magnifications you showed.
I have often wondered how "small we can go" in visualizing our physical world. Young man, you are light years ahead of my mere mortal capability, but your video held my rapt attention. God Bless you and your fine work.
There are about 1 million carbon atoms in the width of a human hair. Take one of those atoms and now make it as big as the observable universe, billions of light years across! crazy right? Now imagine the width of a a small tree trunk say 1m thick inside this universe. This is how small we have managed to get to. This my friend is called 10 to the minus 33cm.
The limit is the plank length. Smaller wavelengths of light are needed,
@@str1xt thats the plank length, and it is much smaller than anything we can observe with any instruments. The smallest things we have observed are quarks, 10^-19 meters
The process is amazing. But equally impressive to the subject matter is that I was able to completely follow "Your Presentation" and you made it interesting! I have no background in this and was in fact on YT looking for motorcycle videos when I got distracted by this.
Stellar job of explaining such advanced process in understandable everyday language!
Optics is one field of physical science that my brain has trouble understanding, but your explanations made perfect sense. As someone that has studied biochemistry extensively, it is astonishing to visualize the chemistry on an atomic level in real life. I could never do what you do, but thank you for being so good at what you do so that I could experience this.
I have been subbed to so many channels before they get popular. It's always such a pleasure when the channel's content revolves around stem subjects. This channel is phenomenal! I look forward to enjoying the content and seeing the channel climb.
Everything you explained made so much sense, I love it. You did a great job making this video. I hope everyone appreciates it as much as I do.
Wow, thank you for sharing this. I like the way how you explain the science in an accessible manner, showing every step of the way and not just jumping to the conclusion. This video in particular taught me a lot about this atomic class of microscopes. I like your other videos too. You make science more accessible to the general public!
Same, I love this. Thinking of showing this to my parents and other older or not so science oriented people
really appreciate how you explain things..some youtubers dont even clearly do that
This was mind blowing! Incredible!
I've always wondered how scientists look at atoms and have never seen a clear, real image of atoms. It's crazy how I never thought about the process of looking at atoms, like how we normally look at things, because they're atoms and we have to use something other than photons. Now I'm really amazed how incredibly difficult and technical it is to look at atoms. These methods are genius. Thank you so much for sharing this amazing footage with us. It's still crazy to think that those are atoms.
Los átomos pueden verse???
Really well presented with such infectious enthusiasm and just enough detail so that I feel I know what you're doing well done!
Going to use the term "piece of light" in my daily life now.
even better than slice of paper
I love it
I've just been accepted to UCSB for Physics and this is making me a million times more excited about it
Dude, I just gotta say, I have watched this video several times now and it completely blows my mind what you are doing here. Being able to views the actual atoms, It's hard to wrap my head around that. Anyways, your channel is really really great !!
Its just a microscope, bud.
You never seen the IBM atom animation?
"check it out, atoms" you say so non chalantly lol. These videos are so cool even though I understand about 30% of whats going on, I still learn something everytime I watch. The way you explained the camera perspective of how the atoms were being viewed and how you have to angle the sample to line the atoms up so you can see through the gaps makes so much sense, and at the same time completely blew my mind
If you explain it like this, it's a really simple and straight forward method.
6:49 the concept of clarity - of the images- was explained by others in other videos. But the difference here is the example you showed with those small balls that mimic atoms and how the image was blurred and later how you got a clear image . Now it makes sense. YOU have done a feynmann job of explaining things in an interesting manner. Tq
You know what's amazing about these pictures - even when looking at atoms there is still more empty space than there is material
Even withing atoms. Aren't atoms themselves like 90% empty space? Cuz it's kinda like the orbit of the moon to the Earth is like the electron around the nucleus, kinda thing
@@mihailmilev9909 Yeah, I was wondering what constitutes 'an atom'. Is what we are seeing the electron shell or a derived virtual image. I was hoping to see the nucleus in there.
I absolutely love when science gives you chills like a certain song or movie scene can do! This stuff is crazy!
you might want to see a mental health professional for that.
BatChest HOLYY I GOT CHILLS I LOVE SCIENCEEEE
Very nice job ! Nice to see some good science happening on yt ! I used a very old samsung TEM few years ago to look at some protein fibers, this bring back some memories
Fell asleep only three times during this video… as much as I love science, this was way too much to watch at 11Pm after a day of work
I'm so impressed with what we have been able to figure out and accomplish as human beings in such a short amount of time.
Q: Is light made of particles or waves?
A: light is comprised of pieces.
1:30
Q: Is light made of particles or waves?
A: Yes
Thank you for this, such a beautiful presentation of those crystalline structures, true microscopy - it was a joy watching the whole video and paying attention to all the stuff you did.