Tiny Bright Things: Touching atoms

Feeling small? It’s on any scientist’s wishlist, from physics to medicine and materials. Mark Pesce explains a new Australian innovation that can get a close-up view at a truly nano-scale.

Have you ever felt an atom? Being made of atoms ourselves, we are always in contact with them, both in our own bodies and in every aspect of the physical world. But we don’t feel them, per se. Even when you lay your palm on the top of a table, you’re not actually feeling atoms – you’re feeling the repulsion of the electrostatic field created by the electrons that whiz around the periphery of every atom at speeds approaching that of light. They create a negative charge that prevents other atoms – also possessing negative charges – from getting too close together. At that level of detail, the whole world of “hard” surfaces becomes something akin to unthinkable numbers of tiny same-pole magnets trying to jam themselves together. They can get close – but not too close.

“We have lots of ideas, the thing that excites us, I guess, is we want the technology to grow beyond us”

The physics of the “untouchable” atom opened the door to the first real attempts to be able to “feel” matter at the atomic scale. In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, researchers working for IBM Zürich, developed the “scanning tunnelling microscope” (STM). Built upon one of the basic effects of quantum mechanics, the STM places what is, in essence, the very sharp tip of a pin very close to a material being examined. When given an electric charge, electrons “jump off” the probe tip and “tunnel” through the material. The pattern of that tunnelling – where and when the electrons leap from tip to material – gives you an image of the material, much as if it had been shot through by an X-ray. Although atoms can’t get close together, Binnig and Rohrer harnessed quantum tunnelling to allow them to ever-so-gently graze one another – research that won them the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1985, Binnig went on to create the first real improvement in the STM – the “atomic force microscope”, or AFM, which added a micromechanical vibrator to the tip of the probe. As the tip of the AFM vibrates back-and-forth, it scans an area of a material at the atomic scale. This tip – just a few millionths of a metre in length – could both “read” the material beneath it, and (with the addition of the appropriate electrical charge) even be used to push that material around, gently nudging individual atoms into new positions. To demonstrate their newfound capability, in 1989 IBM released a famous photo of a set of xenon atoms arranged to form IBM’s logo. This was no easy feat – the same quantum effect that allows electrons to tunnel from tip into material also made it terrifically easy for those atoms to “wander” away from the positions they’d been coaxed into by the AFM.

Atomic force microscopy made it possible to both “read” and “write” atoms, but it took a very clever graduate student at the University of North Carolina, US, to work out how to touch them. Russell M. Taylor fed the information generated by an atomic force microscope into a multi-million-dollar graphics supercomputer (which, given this was back in 1993, was almost certainly less powerful than your average smartphone), using that data to generate a three-dimensional “contour” of the material under the probe tip. Although images generated from AFM scans had given a rough picture of the “shape” of atoms, Taylor’s visualisations offered a sense of depth, placement and orientation – not just a single atom, but this atom in relation to that atom, revealing the structures of chemically interlinked atoms (molecules). Projected onto a surface the size of a table, and viewed with special 3D glasses, these atoms and molecules looked as real as apples and oranges. 

Taylor added one final touch to his research device – his VR system had a haptic interface; that is, it could deliver a faux sense of “touch” to the objects displayed within its tabletop virtual world. You could run your hand (virtually) across the surface of atoms, even push them around and feel them snap back into place. This Nanomanipulator, as Taylor christened it, became one of the landmark works of the first age of virtual reality. Sharing his work with some research chemists, they found themselves amazed that they could “feel” their way across chemical bonds and molecular structures that had always been theoretical abstractions, discovering things they never could have known about these substances, because their sense of touch revealed details no-one had ever even thought to intuit. Involving multiple senses, the Nanomanipulator made the atomic scale tangible, and gave chemists an incredible tool for thinking about their work.

But the Nanomanipulator was big, expensive and delicate. STMs and AFMs require a degree of precision and support that puts them in the rarest bits of laboratory kit – and even if you could get access to one, you’d still need a million-plus dollars of supercomputer to turn it into a Nanomanipulator. Taylor had crafted a breakthrough one-of-a-kind tool. Even preparing a sample for an AFM scan required considerable work; AFMs’ and STMs’ subjects must be placed into an isolated vacuum chamber – which immediately rules out the atomic-scale observation of anything even remotely alive. With the exception of tardigrades, vacuum and life don’t mix.

An accidental discovery made in a laboratory at the University of Melbourne by researcher Christopher Bolton opened a less toxic window onto the nanoscale. In his work with lasers, Bolton saw something he’d neither seen nor heard of before – illuminating something microscopically small from multiple angles produced multiple views of the same object, and Bolton could use a bit of maths to sum those images together into a single view of that Very Small Thing.

As Bolton tells it, the story begins towards the end of his undergraduate studies, when he wound up in the lab of his research advisor Ray Dagastine, where he spent a couple of years “sort of percolating on ways to study how nanoparticles – nanotubes, viruses, things about that sort of scale – how they move and dance and interact with surfaces”.

The pair played with a technique called general reflection microscopy and “spent a long time looking at spheres”. Then they wanted to learn how are things that aren’t spheres dance near surfaces. “And, what we started asking was, what kind of tools can we use? What kind of tools are available?”

The search led eventually to the multiple illumination model, “some fairly complex mathy things to interpret the data” and – voila. “Through this complex math model, we can map out a direct reconstruction.”

These latest microscopes open a new vista onto a world we understand in theory, but have never visited in practice

How small are the things they’re looking at? 

“The smallest thing we’ve looked at is about the smallest kind of virus that exists,” Bolton says. 

“The human eye can see down to about 100 microns, maybe a little smaller,” explains Dagastine. “A human hair is 50 to 100 microns wide. A dust mite – which we can’t see and are in our pillows – are kind of 10 microns-ish. Red blood cells are about five microns; we can still see that with a microscope.

“The coronavirus is about 150 nanometers. … And the smallest thing we’ve looked at is about 25 nanometers. So that’s 1/6th the size of the coronavirus.”

The technique works with pretty much any sample they wanted to throw on a microscope slide – no vacuum necessary. 

“We put a living bacterium on a slide,” Bolton says, “and watched it as it struggled. When it died, it spilled its nanoscale guts onto the slide – and we could see those too!” These were the sorts of events that biologists had theorised about, but have never been able to see happening.

Bolton and Dagastine have turned the discovery into startup Tiny Bright Things. What’s it going to do?

“We have lots of ideas,” says Bolton. “The thing that excites us, I guess, is we want the technology to grow beyond us. And we want to be surprised by the applications. The most obvious things for us are the things informed by our experience, right?”

Dagastine agrees that they both see applications based on their experience. “We both happen to be chemical engineers,” he says. 

“Chris has worked in ag chem. And I’ve interacted with minerals processing and pharma. We actually saw industrial applications as well, particularly in the characterisation of powders, or particles in water, depending on what it is.

“And then the pharmaceutical industry – they really care about the size and shape, but don’t have great ways to measure it. And it’s often how a great deal of their processing goes awry. 

“There’s a great article from about 2005 or 2006, when somebody did a sector analysis, and I think was about $A120 billion globally is what the pharma industry lost from process inefficiencies.”

Four hundred years ago, the first microscopes gave us a window onto a world we had never even imagined. These latest microscopes open a new vista onto a world we understand in theory, but have never visited in practice. How much more will we learn when we see the dance of nanoscopic living beings? And how long until some enterprising graduate student slaps a haptic interface onto this new microscope, so we can touch the surface of a virus, feel its spike proteins, and perhaps learn better how to defend ourselves from them?

Mark PESCE is a professional futurist and public speaker and host of the podcasts “The Next Billion Seconds” and “This Week in Startups Australia”.