According to New Scientist, a team of researchers with IBM has managed to capture a photograph of a full molecule for the first time. Pentacene, which is “a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon consisting of 5 linearly-fused benzene rings,” (Wikipedia) normally looks like a pile of purple or green, powdery crystals, but up this microscopically close you can actually see the structure of the rings.
The molecule is very fragile, but the researchers were able to capture the details of the hexagonal carbon rings and deduce the positions of the surrounding hydrogen atoms.
One key breakthrough was finding a way to stop the microscope’s tip from sticking to the fragile pentacene molecule because of attraction due to electrostatic and van der Waals forces – van der Waals is a weak force that operates only at an intermolecular level.
The team achieved this by fixing a single carbon monoxide molecule to the end of the probe so that only one atom of relatively inactive oxygen came into contact with the pentacene.
I find is amazing that this picture looks pretty precisely like the drawings in a chemistry textbook — you can see those types of drawingsin the Wikipedia article. Way to go, science!
Grant Hamilton
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MPot