Tag Archives: 4-D microscopy

“This is the best microscope we could ever dream of”—Rice University (US) gets new microscope

I believe it’s Emilie Ringe who’s hosting this video about the new microscope at Rice University (Texas, US) and, as you will be able to tell, she’s thrilled.

A June 29, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now explains some of Ringe’s excitement,

Rice University, renowned for nanoscale science, has installed microscopes that will allow researchers to peer deeper than ever into the fabric of the universe.

The Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope, one of the most powerful in the United States, will enable scientists from Rice as well as academic and industrial partners to view and analyze materials smaller than a nanometer — a billionth of a meter — with startling clarity.

The microscope has the ability to take images of materials at angstrom-scale (one-tenth of a nanometer) resolution, about the size of a single hydrogen atom.

Images will be captured with a variety of detectors, including X-ray, optical and multiple electron detectors and a 4K-resolution camera, equivalent to the number of pixels in the most modern high-resolution televisions. The microscope gives researchers the ability to create three-dimensional structural reconstructions and carry out electric field mapping of subnanoscale materials.

“Seeing single atoms is exciting, of course, and it’s beautiful,” said Emilie Ringe, a Rice assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of chemistry. “But scientists saw single atoms in the ’90s, and even before. Now, the real breakthrough is that we can identify the composition of those atoms, and do it easily and reliably.” Ringe’s research group will operate the Titan Themis and a companion microscope that will image larger samples.

A June 29, 2015 Rice University news release, which originated the news item, provides more information about electron microscopes, incident electron beams, and the specifics of the second new piece of equipment being installed,

Electron microscopes use beams of electrons rather than rays of light to illuminate objects of interest. Because the wavelength of electrons is so much smaller than that of photons, the microscopes are able to capture images of much smaller things with greater detail than even the highest-resolution optical microscope.

“The beauty of these newer instruments is their analytical capabilities,” Ringe said. “Before, in order to see single atoms, we had to work a machine for an entire day and get it just right and then take a picture and hold our breath. These days, seeing atoms is routine.

“And now we can probe a particular atom’s chemical composition. Through various techniques, either via scattering intensity, X-rays emission or electron-beam absorption, we can figure out, say, that we’re looking at a palladium atom or a carbon atom. We couldn’t do that before.”

Ringe said when an electron beam ejects a bound electron from a target atom, it creates an empty site. “That can be filled by another electron within the atom, and the energy difference between this electron and the missing electron is emitted as an X-ray,” she said. “That X-ray is like a fingerprint, which we can read. Different types of atoms have different energies.”

She said the incident electron beam loses a bit of energy when it knocks an atom’s electron loose, and that energy loss can also be measured with a spectroscope to identify the atom. The X-ray and electron techniques are independent but complementary. “Typically, you use either/or, and it depends on what element you’re looking at,” Ringe said.

The second instrument, a Helios NanoLab 600 DualBeam microscope, will be used for three-dimensional imaging, analysis of larger samples and preparation of thin slices of samples for the more powerful Titan next door.

Both tools reside in the university’s Brockman Hall for Physics, which opened in 2011 and features sophisticated vibration-dampening capabilities. The microscopes require the best possible isolation from vibration, electric fields and acoustic noise to produce the best images, Ringe said.

“We have wanted a high-end microscopy facility at Rice because so many of us are working on nanomaterials,” said Pulickel Ajayan, a professor and founding chair of Rice’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. “This has been an issue because in order to be competitive you have to have the best atomic-scale characterization techniques. This will put us in business in terms of imaging and understanding new materials.”

He said the facility will position Rice as one of the most competitive institutions to recruit students and faculty, attract grants and publish groundbreaking results.

“A visual image of something on an atomic level can give you so much more information than a few numbers can,” said Peter Rossky, a theoretical chemist and dean of Rice’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences. Comparing images of the same material taken by an older electron microscope and the Titan Themis was like “the difference between a black-and-white TV and high-definition color,” he said.

Ringe said Rice’s Titan is a fourth-generation model manufactured in the Netherlands. It’s the latest and most powerful model and the first to be installed in the United States.

“Taking a complex image — not just a picture but a spectrum image that has lots of energy information — in the older model would take about 35 minutes,” she said. “By that time, the electron beam has destroyed whatever you were trying to look at.

“With this generation, you have the data you need in about two minutes. You can generate a lot more data more quickly. It’s not just better; it’s enabling.”

Edwin Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, expects the new instruments to ignite the already strong research culture at the university. “This is going to influence the kind of people who will be attracted to apply to and then come to Rice,” said Thomas, a materials scientist. “I’m sure there will be people on campus who, once they find out the capabilities, are going to shift their compasses and take advantage of these machines. The whole point is to have an impact on science and society.”

Rice plans to host a two-day workshop in September to introduce the microscopes and their capabilities to the research community at the university and beyond. [emphasis mine] Beginning this summer, Ringe said, the electron microscopy center will be open to Rice students and faculty as well as researchers from other universities and industry.

Ringe looks forward to bringing researchers into the new microscopy lab — and to the research that will emerge.

“I hope everyone’s going to come out with a blockbuster paper with images from these instruments,” she said. “I would like every paper from Rice to have fantastic, crystal-clear, atomic-resolution images and the best possible characterization.”

To sum this up, there are two new pieces of equipment (Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope and Helios NanoLab 600 DualBeam microscope) in Rice University’s 2011 facility, Brockman Hall for Physics. They are very excited about having the most powerful microscope in the US (the Titan) and hope to be holding a two-day workshop on these new microscopes for the research community at Rice and at other institutions.

Nano as per story, communication, and 4-D microscopy

It’s been a very slow week but I finally found a few good things. First, a 4-D microscope has been developed by researchers at CalTech. The breakthrough was compared to Eadweard Muybridge’s breakthrough photographic work (he was the first to photograph proof that all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground while galloping) in the 19th Century. Ahmed Zewail, 1999 winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and his colleagues have published their findings in the November 21, 2008 issue of Science. With this equipment, scientists will now be able to observe the behaviour of atoms and molecules over space and time. There’s a more detailed article here.

In March 2009, there’s going to be an international advanced communication course regarding nanotechnology at Oxford University. It’s called ‘Public Communication and Applied Ethics of Nanotechnology’ but it seems more like a standard course on how a nonprofessional communicator should get their message out to the public, government agencies, and other interested parties. Oddly, they haven’t listed anyone’s credentials and most of this presenters seem to be academics. With session titles like “How do the media work,” Reviewing participants’ prepared press releases,” etc., I’d expect a few less academics to be presenting and more practitioners. If you’re interested, there’s a description of the event here and a brochure here.

The National Academy of Sciences in the US has a new initiative where they will ‘matchmake’ between filmmakers, scriptwriters, and other creative types with scientists in a bid for scientific accuracy in products from the entertainment industry. They had a symposium in Los Angeles this last Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008. I find the idea interesting although I had an experience last year which points to at least one pitfall.

Before I get to the pitfall, I need to lead up to it. During last year’s national Science and Technology Week (Canada), Genome BC had an event where they invited the producers and actors from a tv programme called ‘Regenesis’ to a public dialogue. We sat at tables of about 8 – 10 people and listened to what they had to say about the science represented in the show. The lead played a geneticist who solved the week’s story crisis with his understanding of genetics. We watched a clip from the show and then proceeded to discuss it. Here’s my best description of the clip (memory may not be exact),

The lead researcher geneticist meets an adolescent male who’s in trouble. The geneticists run a DNA profile of this troubled adolescent and presents information in a courtroom science. We’re told that there are certain genetic markers that can indicate if someone is predisposed to addiction (and I think he also included violence). Apparently the average person will show 8 out of 40 (I think) potential markers, the troubled adolescent had 32 of the markers which was dramatically revealed to the court in an image of his DNA test results.

As we all should be, everyone at the table was concerned about the ethics but, surprisingly, no one questioned the science.  I don’t mean that the science was necessarily incorrect just that nothing is ever that cut and dried. I did pipe up and luckily there was a geneticist beside me who concurred although most of the people didn’t seem that convinced.

From a storytelling perspective, the problem is that the writer needs to heighten the tension for the demands of the story and most scientific results should be qualified in a nuanced fashion which does lend itself to dramatic tension. So, I’m glad they’re working towards more scientific authenticity but there is a limit to what they can do and still have an interesting story to tell.