Sensitive giant probes atomic world

City-dwelling scientists wanting to escape the cacophony of urban life could do worse than land a job at the home of the UK's most powerful microscope.The vault in which the behemoth is housed is buried deep under the streets that flank the Albert Hall in London.Once the double doors-designed to eliminate contamination of all kind, not just noise-suck shut, the room takes on the air of a mausoleum.Even the technicians and scientists gathered at the base of Titan, as the microscope is known, talk in hushed, respectful tones.But their silence is not just for the benefit of their fellow academics, it is an operational requirement of the machine."If the sample drifts, it kills the experiment," said Dr David McComb of Imperial College London, where the microscope is housed.With a machine that is able to image individual atoms, even the vibrations caused by talking too loudly are enough to shunt a sample. When scientists are operating at such small scales, tiny shifts can appear huge."The drift rate has got to be better than one nanometre per minute," he explained.
One nanometre is a billionth of a metre."It's about how much your finger nail grows in one minute," said Dr James Perkins, one of the research scientists who use the sensitive giant to probe the atomic structure of the world.
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