Saturday, August 15, 2009

One Nano-Step Closer To Weighing A Single Atom

Composite image showing TEM images and schematic of bipyramid-shaped particles and time response of vibration. (Credit: Dr Matthew Pelton from the Centre for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2009) — By studying gold nanoparticles with highly uniform sizes and shapes, scientists now understand how they lose energy, a key step towards producing nanoscale detectors for weighing any single atom.

Such ultrasensitive measurements could ultimately be used in areas such as medical research and diagnostics, enabling the detection of minuscule disease-causing agents such as viruses and prions at the single molecule level.

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