First captured image of electron clouds inside one atom

@microscopynews ; original post at New Scientist

These are the first images of a carbon atom's electron clouds, showing several arrangements of the clouds (in blue) as they orbit the nucleus.

The images were captured by Igor Mikhailovskij's team at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, Ukraine.

The team unravelled a sheet of graphene – a one-atom-thick lattice of carbon atoms – to create a carbon-atom chain, which they put in a vacuum at 4.2 kelvin.

They then ran 425 volts through the carbon, causing the atom at the tip to emit electrons onto a phosphor screen and produce the image.

The study will be published in Physical Review B

btw: I completely forget what I learned in my colledge Physical Chemistry class - here is a googled image of the carbon electron clouds model