Electronic microscope exceeds barrier

2007/11/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika

The first electron microscope capable of visualizing medium angstrom structures, i.e., 0.05 nm, was performed. It is called TEAM (transmission electron aberration-corrected microscope) and has been jointly carried out by three groups of researchers from the United States and Germany. With this, researchers believe that they will be able to better understand the structure and dynamics of matter on an atomic scale.

So far electronic microscopes were not able to distinguish things smaller than an Angstrom --it is smaller than the separation between atoms of a solid -. One of the limits is spherical aberration, that is, the diffuse produced in the image cylindrical lenses used when focusing electrons. Now they have managed to overcome this problem. However, they want to improve even more and the next step is to correct chromatic aberration.