(PhysOrg.com) -- A Spanish research team in Barcelona working out of the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology, has succeeded in building the most sensitive scale ever created. It’s capable, as the team describes in their paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, of weighing a single proton.

For most of civilized human history, people have been weighing things, all the while trying to improve on their ability to do so. Something’s mass quite often leads to its value, and modern scales are no different. A scale that can weigh not just atoms, but their parts, could be useful as a tool to help researchers distinguish between minute quantities of different materials, or medical researches looking to find differences between very similar molecules.

The team achieved their feat by using a short carbon nanotube (~150 nm) that vibrates at a frequency of just under 2 GHz, working as a nanomechanical resonator. Measurements are made by noting changes in vibrations when objects are placed on it. By using a shorter than normal nanotube, the team was able to achieve better resolution than with current scales and found it could be used at lower temperatures as well. In their test, they weighed a xenon atom (in a vacuum) to the nearest 10-24 grams (one septillionth of a gram) or one yoctogram, after first heating the nanotube to remove any other atoms that might have been present. In so doing, they found they were able to weigh one single proton (1.7 yoctograms), a truly astounding achievement. The previous best mass sensitivity measurement was a whopping 100 yoctograms.

The researchers suggest that the scale could be used for surface science, magnetometry and mass spectrometry applications to weigh cells, gas molecules and biomolecules.

Unfortunately, while building a scale with such sensitivity is truly remarkable, there remains one more hurdle. As with any scale, its usefulness only becomes apparent when it becomes available to others. Thus, a way to create a process whereby such a scale could be produced in sufficient quantity at a reasonable cost still needs to be worked out. Once that happens though, it’s likely this new scale will become an important research tool in labs across the world.

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