“Smoothest” mirror could lead to new microscopes

Phys­i­cists have cre­at­ed the smoothest sur­face ev­er made, called a “quan­tum sta­bi­lised at­om mir­ror,” ac­cord­ing to this week’s edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Ad­vanced Ma­te­ri­als.

The scientists from the Au­ton­o­mous Uni­ver­s­ity of Ma­drid and the Ma­drid In­sti­tute of Ad­vanced Stud­ies in Na­no­sci­ence say the in­nova­t­ion is be­ing used to de­sign the world’s first at­omic mi­cro­scope.

The mirror is designed to reflect beams of atoms. One of the stu­dy’s au­thors, Rodolfo Mi­ran­da of the Au­ton­o­mous Uni­ver­s­ity, said the mir­ror re­flects “ex­tra­or­di­narily well” most of these at­oms, through the use of ma­te­ri­als of near-zero thick­ness whose prop­er­ties are dom­i­nat­ed by quan­tum, or at­omic-scale ef­fects.

The mir­ror re­sem­bles a curved wa­fer. It is made up of a thin sil­i­con crys­tal with a thick­ness of one-twentieth of a mil­li­me­ter, and cov­ered with a lay­er of lead one or two mil­lionths of a mil­li­me­ter thick.

To study the re­flec­tion on this met­al, the sci­en­tists used he­li­um at­oms. Un­til now mir­rors made solely from sil­i­con re­flected one per­cent of he­li­um at­oms, but by adding the lay­er of lead they have man­aged to achieve a re­flec­tion of up to 67 per­cent, the sci­en­tists re­ported.


Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080922_mirror