Fc*king paywalls. This is such an amazing article, if only they could not have paywalls for research articles. Its as if the licenses will make enough money to fund the research, stupidity I say.
I'm genuinely impressed by this research and would have probably become a physicist myself if images like this were available when I was in high school. But I have a nit to pick...<p>"hexagonal bonds of carbon atoms"<p>No. Maybe I'm just having an issue with the terminology, but those hexagonal shapes are not the "bonds" like the ones we'd draw for a molecular shape in chemistry class. That's just where the orbiting electrons squeeze between the nuclei. You get these bright lines because electrons' orbital paths are concentrated in these areas.
Does anyone know if the tip carbon monoxide was oxygen toward the probed surface or carbon? I wonder if using the same atom to probe as be probed is part of the resolution enhancement.
Amazing pictures. But not really sure what I'm looking at here. Are those red spheres meant to be the nuclei of atoms? Are the bright hexagonal lines meant to be the path of electrons? If so, isn't the nucleus much too large in relation to the size of the whole atom? Isn't the proportion of the size of the nucleus to the whole atom akin to the size of a fly in a cathedral?
Some IBM group produced images of single and double bonds "pre-internet", or very early internet at the latest.<p>I remember thinking how the double bonds looked like the plastic plug-together model that I had for chemistry class.