Posted on 07/11/2013 10:29:14 PM PDT by neverdem
Physical limits mean that electron microscopy may be nearing highest possible resolution.
Plans for the next generation of electron microscopes have been dealt a blow by the discovery of an unexpected source of noise that could frustrate efforts to improve resolution to well below the size of an atom.
Researchers working for a leading manufacturer of advanced optics describe the noise source in a paper1 now in press. They think that they can find a way to mitigate it, but electron microscopists admit that the finding is the latest sign that their costly quest to capture ever more detailed images is coming up against physical limits. Some say their efforts might be better spent on making instruments cheaper and more widely available.
“Is it better to have ten machines working at 1-ångström resolution solving hundreds of materials-science problems, or one expensive instrument that may not work — but will push the boundaries?” asks David Muller, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Electron microscopes, first developed in the early twentieth century, fire electrons through a material and use the way they scatter to produce images thousands of times finer than can be captured with a light microscope. In 1959, US physicist Richard Feynman set a daunting challenge: to reach a resolution of 0.1 Å, smaller than the radius of an atom. Nearly 60 years later, in 2008, the US$27-million Transmission Electron Aberration-Corrected Microscope (TEAM) project, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, unveiled a microscope with a resolution of 0.5 Å — twice the sensitivity a microscope had achieved four years before, and the size of the smallest chemical bonds in nature. Since then, manufacturers have been pushing to make that technology more affordable, microscopists in Japan and Germany have planned their own sub-ångström instruments and the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Fascinating.
Lots of action down there.
It's the life of the world. Can you feel it?
Why not build an array microscope?
That is; say 100 cameras of maybe lower resolution that is able to more information resulting in greater depth?
Someone, somewhere, who you least expect to, will invent a better way. That’s how it works. Only two hundred years ago we were reliant on animals, our own legs and wind to travel. No one had ever gone much beyond 35 miles per hour. We had no engines, no electricity, no artificial light, no way of communicating instantly with anyone beyond earshot, etc. Two centuries later, look around you.
In another two centuries then what? Energy beings? The Matrix? A new Dark Age?
Jagged graphene edges can slice into cell membranes
A sound idea to redefine temperature
Researchers perform first direct measurement of Van der Waals force
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
“In another two centuries then what?”
Mud huts.
So, take 1000 pictures and integrate the results. Problem solved! (Where can I pick up the check for my consulting fee?)
I’m with you. Things will continue to get better. We’re watching the end of socialism. It has expanded as far as it can.
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