Picture of Single Trapped Atom Wins UK Science Photography Prize
Years ago, someone created a similar picture with a single atomic <i>nucleus</i>.  I&#x27;d like to find it again.<p>Normally, nuclear transitions are invisibly-high energies.  X-ray and gamma.  But a couple of nuclei have multi-step spin isomer decays (or was it shape isomer?).  One step of which is visible.  So someone trapped and fully stripped a nucleus, and bombarded it to visibility.  Naked-eye visibility.  And took a picture.  Of vacuum vessel window, with a green(?) fluorescence dot.<p>I saw that picture years ago.  Likely a cover photo on something.<p><i>I would very much like to find it again.</i>  For use in educational content.  A lot of time has been spent looking for it, both by myself, and a couple of MIT science librarians.  If anyone has a clue, I&#x27;d very much appreciate it.  Here is a mockup[1] I gimped for user testing.<p>Why use it in education?  To make the concept of atoms more concrete.  Atomic <i>electrons</i> are too small (and slow and fragile) to see with your naked eye.  But (a couple of) nuclei you can (under hard-to-contrive conditions).  Absent concrete, students build their understanding of materials on  muddy misconceptions.  For example, one failure-mode in teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects.<p>And to preempt a common response... one professor complained &quot;you aren&#x27;t really seeing the nucleus - it&#x27;s only a diffraction dot&quot;... right before they headed out to a star party, to apparently &quot;not see&quot; stars. ;)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clarifyscience.info&#x2F;assets&#x2F;2017-Atoms&#x2F;assets0&#x2F;wk&#x2F;ChamberWindow--fake.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clarifyscience.info&#x2F;assets&#x2F;2017-Atoms&#x2F;assets0&#x2F;wk&#x2F;...</a>