<story><title>Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>october_sky</author><text>I love how amateur the physical machine looks, with all of that aluminum foil stuck to it and the wires falling about. This immediately reminded me of how my codebase looks whenever I am doing a proof-of-concept just to show someone that something is possible. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#x27;s get it working before we make it look pretty&amp;quot; -- what I imagined they said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kurthr</author><text>I worked with Dr. Lutz about 20yr ago, helping to make some of the early magnetically tipped cantilevers for the effort at single atom NMR. It&amp;#x27;s interesting to me that the NYT shifted the nomenclature to MRI... although with microscopic scanning that is what they can achieve. It&amp;#x27;s not that weird because (at the time) the tip magnetic field caused a torus to interact with the cantilever when the atom(s) resonate, so they do have to deconvolve the effect to localize the atom and I assume that they use force feedback control to maintain position much like STM (Tunneling Microscopy). I probably would have called it something like NMM (Nuclear Magnetic-Resonance Microscopy), but hey I didn&amp;#x27;t make it work!&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d note that the same group headed by Lutz achieved single electron ESR with a similar scanning methodology at least 15 years back so this was follow on work. It&amp;#x27;s still amazing and incredibly difficult... just imagine how you would produce something (a test sample) that you know will have only 1 magnetically resonant atom in the affected scan area!&lt;p&gt;At the time the hope was to use single atom NMR to image DNA, but I think that has largely been accomplished by other methods.&lt;p&gt;edit: The paper in Nature for those with access.
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41567-019-0573-x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41567-019-0573-x&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>october_sky</author><text>I love how amateur the physical machine looks, with all of that aluminum foil stuck to it and the wires falling about. This immediately reminded me of how my codebase looks whenever I am doing a proof-of-concept just to show someone that something is possible. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#x27;s get it working before we make it look pretty&amp;quot; -- what I imagined they said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frereubu</author><text>A bit like the first full-size MRI machine in fact: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;History_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:MRI_Scanner_Mark_One.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;History_of_magnetic_resonance_...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>