infocus #18 June 2010 Seeing Atoms

"If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact; or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms."

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.57

It is not an unreasonable paraphrase of this famous statement by Richard Feynman (1964) to say that "to understand the properties of all material things we need only to know which atoms are where". Electron microscopy is a technique that in the last decade has been able to image and analyse the atomic structure of a range of materials with atom by atom sensitivity and has led to a greater understanding of materials properties, from nanotubes and nanowires through to grain boundaries in metal alloys and ferritin particles in cells.

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Authors

Mhairi Gass

Serco Technical Consultancy Services

After completing her PhD on analytical scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) at the University of Liverpool, Mhairi moved to Cambridge University as a research associate, where she developed energy filtered tomography to extract elemental information and enable differentiation between carbonaceous materials in 3-dimensions. In 2005 Mhairi joined the SuperSTEM project where she operated the aberration corrected STEMs for external researchers as well as developing her own research in energy loss spectroscopy of graphitic nanostructures and running the day-to-day operations. With a keen interest in promoting science to the general public, Mhairi has been involved in a number of events such as the Royal Society Summer Science Festival and the BA Festival of Science. Recently Mhairi moved to industry where she now works as a Materials Specialist for Serco.

Andrew Bleloch

SuperSTEM,

Andrew Bleloch runs the SuperSTEM aberration corrected electron microscopy facility at Daresbury Laboratories as well as teaching Materials Science at the University of Liverpool. He gained his PhD developing new techniques on the VG HB501 STEM in Archie Howie and Mick Brown’s group at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. More recently he has pioneered the application of aberration corrected STEM techniques to a wide range of sample systems from the ubiquitous silicon 110 through nanotubes rods and particles to tentative experiments on biological samples.