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No one has "seen" an atom in the normal sense of viewing it with your eyes, even with a powerful microscope.

If you broaden the meaning of the phase "see an atom" to include see images showing atoms, then there are some answers.

X-ray diffraction creates images that result from atoms but one actually sees is a set of dots on an X-ray detector which are positioned in a certain way because the bounce of atoms in a crystal. W.L.Bragg and his son W. H. Bragg were pioneers around 1900 in creating X-ray diffraction images from crystals.

Many other processes can be said to produce such indirect images of atoms, but in recent decades, particularly at the IBM, there has been progress with a different kind of microscope. First, there was the scanning tunneling microscope and then the atomic force microscope, both of which give detect small changes in the signal from a tiny needle that moves across the surface of an object. The motions can be controlled with such accuracy that the signal changes occurring at different positions can be attributed to different atoms with different properties at different positions. In this way, a kind of mapping of the surface that maps individual atoms can be accomplished and the resultant image of an area of surface allows one to pick out individual atoms. We can say then that we have a picture with individual atoms, so we can "see" them. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 was given for this work and shared by Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer.

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12y ago

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