Illuminating Atoms was an exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, London, for the International Year of Crystallography 2014. Crystallography reveals the atomic structure of materials, from minerals to magnets to viruses, and it underpins many of the biggest scientific discoveries of the past 100 years, including the chemical structures of antibiotics and DNA.
By exposing a crystal to a beam of X-rays, it is possible to obtain the characteristic ‘diffraction’ pattern of a material and work out where the atoms are located inside the crystal.