how come that in those “atoms doing stuff” videos, the background is not made of atoms too?
In: Chemistry
It is made of atoms, but its made of different atoms that behave differently in the microscope. When you get down to the atomic level, electrons can behave in ways that seem very peculiar. Since electrons are what we visualise in an electron microscope, we’re looking for how the electrons respond to the atoms. The background is typically a material that electrons don’t change their behaviour much in response to, while the material being looked at is something that electrons do change their behaviour a lot in response to. That contrast between big response and small response is how the atoms are distinguished from the background.
For example, in the case of the IBM movie “a boy and his atom”, the background is a sheet of copper atoms and the dots that make up the video itself are oxygen atoms, which show up in the electron microscope used as round dots – as opposed to the sheet of copper, which shows up as a homogenous sheet.
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