Electron microscopy has existed for nearly a century, but a record-breaking modern iteration finally achieved what physicists have waited decades to see—for the first time, a transmission electron microscope is capturing an electron with such clarity they can see its individual components. Researchers believe they have unlocked an entirely new realm of optical science they are now calling “attomicroscopy” that will influence the worlds of quantum physics, biology, and chemistry.
The breakthrough comes from a team led by experts at the University of Arizona and is detailed in a new study published August 21 in Science Advances. Mohammed Hassan, a UA associate professor of physics and optical sciences, likens transmission electron microscopes to a smartphone’s camera.
“When you get the latest version of a smartphone, it comes with a better camera,” Hassan said in an accompanying university statement on Wednesday. “… With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”
[Related: Winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics measured electrons by the attosecond.]
While the original electron microscope arrived in the early 1930’s (there’s still a controversy to this day over who invented the very first one), scientists have relied on what are known as transmission electron microscopes since the 2000s. In these devices, objects are magnified millions of times their size far beyond what light microscopes can accomplish. This is due to their reliance on pulses of electron laser beams fired at a target. From there, extremely precise camera sensors and lenses image these atomic particles as they pass through the sample. The changes observed in a subject between these images is what is called a microscope’s temporal resolution. To increase the resolution, researchers have turned to speeding up those laser bursts down to attoseconds…
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