Deciding whether a substance is, say, steel, brick, wood or plastic is easy--but not on the atomic scale, which lacks information about such everyday characteristics. Using an atomic-force microscope (AFM), however, an international team of physicists has developed a method of atomic "fingerprinting" that can determine the chemical identity of individual atoms on a surface mixed with all of them.
This article was originally published with the title Atomic Fingerprinting.
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