A unique electron microscope, the first of its kind in the world, was unveiled yesterday at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in Warrington.
The SuperSTEM 2, or Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope, can show an atom at 20 million times its size, meaning an atom would appear 5mm wide.
However, it is not just the scale of magnification that makes SuperSTEM 2 unique – it is also the sharpness of the image, its capability to provide elemental and chemical data about atoms and its stability. Built on sandstone bedrock, the incredibly stable geological conditions at the Daresbury Laboratory is one of the key reasons for its location – the system is so stable that any sample in the microscope would move no more than half a millimetre in 100 years.
The SuperSTEM 2, which scans a beam -- focussed to the size of an atom -- across a sample, has an inbuilt computer-controlled system to correct lens defects.
No comments:
Post a Comment