What a penny looks like through an electron microscope
IBM Research is working on designing the future of chips. And at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, this sophisticated piece of equipment lets scientists inspect electronic components 50,000 times smaller than we can see with our unaided eye.
Behind the doors of an anechoic chamber at IBM Research Yorktown, shielded from subtle vibrations, research engineer John Ott operates a scanning electron microscope (SEM) that lets scientists inspect the surfaces of tiny, sensitive circuit components. With this machine, he can detect minuscule imperfections in chips that can help researchers designing tomorrow’s processors see where potential flaws in their designs are.
Whereas an optical microscope like the one you used in your high school biology class reflects light off the surface of an object to illuminate it, an SEM fires a beam of electrons at an object through a magnetic lens — rather than one made of glass. This beam scans over the surface of the sample in the chamber, and sensitive detectors pick up the scattered electrons to generate an image that can be viewed on a monitor.
A standard optical microscope can tend to magnify objects between four and 100 times what we can see with our eyes alone. The SEM in Ott’s lab, however, can visualize objects 50,000 times smaller. Recently, a team from IBM Research visited Ott’s lab to see how the machine works. Ott showed us that a standard U.S. penny actually has two images of Abraham Lincoln on it — his profile you can see on the front, and the tiny statue of him sitting inside the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse.
Join us on a look inside Ott’s lab as he uses the SEM to give you a view of a penny you’ve never seen before.