Thursday, November 29

Probing crystals, one column of atoms at a time

One of the things that makes new science possible is having shiny new toys to play with - once a technique has been developed and made practical, all sorts of new information can be gained in a large number of areas.

In transmission electron microscopy, for example, rapid recent advances mean we're able to get more information from smaller regions of samples. A paper in this week's Nature by Kimoto et al, demonstrates electron energy loss spectroscopy from individual columns of atoms in a crystal. As a microscopist myself, I have to say - this is really, really cool.

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