No room is left at the bottom. A team of physicists has shown how a common type of electron microscope can spot single hydrogen atoms — the smallest atoms of them all.
![A team has detected hydrogen atoms using a common type of electron microscope. Here, isolated hydrogen atoms show up as purple peaks in data from a transmission electron microscope. The elevation and color represent what would be shades of gray on a two-dimensional image.](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/8350.jpg?resize=300%2C220&ssl=1)
Previously, electron microscopes had trouble imaging single atoms lighter than carbon.
The University of California, Berkeley team visualized defects and impurities — including atoms of hydrogen— on graphene, the one-atom-thick, chicken-wire nets of carbon that normally stack up to form graphite. “Think of it sort of as a spider web,” says study coauthor Alex Zettl of the graphene, “and the atoms you want to view are flies on the spider web.”