Credit: N. Hanacek/NIST
NIST researcher June Lau with a transmission electron microscope (TEM) that she and her colleagues retrofitted in order to make high-quality atom-scale movies.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators have developed a way to retrofit the transmission electron microscope — a long-standing scientific workhorse for making crisp microscopic images — so that it can also create high-quality movies of super-fast processes at the atomic and molecular scale. Compatible with electron microscopes old and new, the retrofit promises to enable fresh insights into everything from microscopic machines to next-generation computer chips and biological tissue by making this moviemaking capability more widely available to laboratories everywhere.
“We want to be able to look at things in materials science that happen really quickly,” said NIST scientist June Lau. She reports the first proof-of-concept operation of this retrofitted design with her colleagues in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments. The team designed the retrofit to be a cost-effective add-on to existing instruments. “It’s expected to be a fraction of the cost of a new electron microscope,” she said.
A nearly 100-year-old invention, the electron microscope remains an essential tool in many scientific laboratories. A popular version is known as the transmission electron microscope (TEM), which fires electrons through a target sample to produce an image. Modern versions of the microscope can magnify objects by as much as 50 million times. Electron microscopes have helped to determine the structure of viruses, test the operation of computer circuits, and reveal the effectiveness of new drugs.
“Electron microscopes can look at very tiny things on the atomic scale,” Lau said. “They are great. But historically, they look at things that are fixed in tim ..
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