中国地质大学(北京)施倪承、马哲生、廖立兵在国家自然科学基金的资助下与中国科学院化学所合作,首次用扫描隧道显微镜(STM)直接在大气下观察到了辉银矿、辉钼矿、方铅矿的原子级分辨率的表面结构图象,从而使结构矿物学研究进入到观察表面及实时晶体结构的新阶段,对于矿物学发展具重大意义。人类对于原子级别的微观世界的认识有多种观察手段。本世纪初发展起来的X射线衍射技术已能有效地测定固态晶体物质的原子排列,但它的局限性在于不能直接“观察”到原子位置,而必须通过对衍射强度数据的复杂的数学推导并经富利叶变换后才能获得原子坐标。而且只能得到亿万个晶胞的平均晶体结构。电子衍射及透射电子显微镜在实时观察方面比X射线进了一步,但它对薄晶体观察时获得的图象往往是数十个纳米厚度的很多层原子叠加 China University of Geosciences (Beijing) Shi Ni Cheng, Ma Zhesheng, Liao Libing cooperation with the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Chemistry under the auspices of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the first time using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) observed in the atmosphere directly gabionite, molybdenite , The atomic resolution of galena surface structure images, so that structural mineralogy into the observation of the surface and real-time crystal structure of a new stage for the development of mineralogy of great significance. There are many ways in which human beings can understand the atomic level of the micro-world. The X-ray diffraction developed at the beginning of this century has been able to effectively determine the atomic arrangement of solid crystalline materials. However, its limitation is that it can not “directly observe” the atomic position, but must be derived from the complicated mathematical derivation of the diffraction intensity data After the Fourier transform can obtain atomic coordinates. And only get the average crystal structure of hundreds of millions of unit cells. Electron diffraction and transmission electron microscopy are a step further than X-ray in terms of real-time observation, but the images they obtain for thin crystals are often superposed on many layers of atoms of tens of nanometers in thickness