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Spotting such tiny impurities could help build more efficient and powerful quantum computers.  

Now, the team predicts that X-ray imaging will detect a single atom inside a solid sample within the next year or so.  

In a regular chest X-ray, heavier and lighter elements show up differently. This allows us to see metal screws or bones. Density alters the contrast, which is how we can pick out air-filled lungs.

The Surrey scientists wondered how small a density the X-ray could detect.  

They developed an experiment with colleagues at DESY (Germany), UCL, and Madison-Wisconsin to find out. They used the X-ray facilities at the (USA). 

At Surrey’s Ion Beam Centre, they implanted just 350 zeptogrammes of gallium atoms in an otherwise pure silicon crystal. That’s about a million billion times less than the mass of an ant or about a billion times less than that of a single cell.  

Remarkably, the X-rays were sensitive enough to find the tiny cluster of gallium atoms.