| We can directly see the hidden world of atoms thanks to electron microscopes, first developed in the 1930s. Today, electron microscopes, which use beams of electrons to illuminate and magnify a sample, have become even more sophisticated, allowing scientists to take real-world snapshots of materials with a resolution of less than half the diameter of a hydrogen atom. | |
| Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are pushing the boundaries of electron microscopy even further through a powerful technique called 4D-STEM, a term that stands for “2D raster of 2D diffraction patterns using scanning transmission electron microscopy.” | |
| Their findings, reported in Nature Communications (“Direct measurement of nanostructural change during in situ deformation of a bulk metallic glass”) and Nature Materials (“Diffraction imaging of nanocrystalline structures in organic semiconductor molecular thin films”), show for the first time how 4D-STEM can provide direct insight into the performance of any material – from strong metallic glass to flexible semiconducting films – by pinpointing specific atomic “neighborhoods” that could compromise a material’s performance, or perhaps have the potential to improve it. |
Image Credit: Colin Ophus/Berkeley Lab
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