Abstract
As a teenager, David N. Seidman was so fascinated with atoms that he longed to be able to look at them. “But my high school chemistry teacher said it was impossible to see atoms,” recalls Seidman, now a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. Little did Seidman’s teacher know, atoms were about to show themselves for the first time. Fifty-nine years ago this week, Pennsylvania State University physics professor Erwin W. Muller made history by directly imaging individual atoms with an inexpensive instrument he designed and built: a field-ion microscope. Inside the evacuated glass apparatus, a powerful electric field ran through a sharply pointed tungsten specimen, causing atoms to fly off the surface of the metal tip and reveal themselves by lighting up a nearby fluorescent screen. Seidman did eventually get to “see” atoms by using field-ionization methods as a young faculty member at Cornell University in ...
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