Here’s a challenge: envision a trillionth of something. You might think of one penny compared to 10 billion dollars. Or how in travelling one meter, the Earth completes around a trillionth of its annual journey. Now you can add one more thing to the list, thanks to researchers in Zurich: a picometer, or a trillionth of a meter, is around the smallest distance that humans can resolve with a microscope.
Building on their impressive microscopy work over the last few years, a team from IBM has refined their method to precisely measure the structural details of a single molecule. With their technique, they managed to measure very subtle differences in the distribution of electrons within the molecule’s bonds. How subtle? We’re talking 3 picometers or 0.000000000003 meters.
That’s one-hundredth the diameter of an atom!
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