Day: April 11, 2019

Yoke Khin Yap, professor of physics at Michigan Tech, led the study. He explains that the behavior his team observed — atomic-level manipulation of gold quantum dots — can be seen with a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). The STEM’s high-powered beam of electrons enables researchers like Yap to watch atomic movement in real-time and the view reveals how gold atoms interact with the surface of boron nitride nanotubes. Basically, the gold atoms glide along the surface of the nanotubes and, they stabilize in a hover just above the hexagon honeycomb of the boron nitride nanotubes.

Read more at Michigan Tech News, by Allison Mills.

Related:

Atomic Zoom: Michigan Tech’s Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope

Paul Sanders, Patrick Horvath Endowed Associate Professor of materials science and engineering, and materials science and engineering graduate student Yang Yang, are trying to strengthen aluminum by adding scandium to it.

The aberration-corrected FEI Titan Themis scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) in Michigan Tech’s Applied Chemical and Morphological Analysis Laboratory, makes an electron beam less than an atom in width. This allows researchers to scan through samples one atom column at a time. Additionally, the lab has a SuperXTM X-ray detector, which is an array of four detectors to collect four times more X-rays than a conventional detector.

Combining the two techniques, researchers can element map at atomic resolution.

Read more at Unscripted, by Kelley Christensen.

Related:

S-TEM Provides Insight to Alloy Behavior