By using one of the world’s most powerful electron microscopes, a team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully mapped the exact location and chemical type of 23,000 atoms in a nanoparticle made of iron and platinum. The team believes this work could reveal more information about material properties at the single-atom level, opening the doors to improving magnetic performance for next-generation hard drives.
This from LBNL:
Their nanoparticle reconstruction builds on an achievement they reported last year in which they measured the coordinates of more than 3,000 atoms in a tungsten needle to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter (19 picometers), which is many times smaller than a hydrogen atom. Now, they’ve taken the same precision, added the ability to distinguish different elements, and scaled up the reconstruction to include tens of thousands of atoms.
“The important materials science problem we are tackling is how this material transforms from a highly randomized structure, what we call a chemically-disordered structure,” says Colin Ophus, co-author of the study, “into a regular highly-ordered structure with the desired magnetic properties.”