BERKELEY, Calif., July 17 (UPI) — Researchers have for the first time found a way to photograph nanoparticles in a solution by combining three separate imaging techniques in order to produce 3D images of their structures.
Nanoparticles are thought by scientists to be the building blocks for next generation materials, making the ability to see and understand their structure vital.
“Understanding structural details of colloidal nanoparticles is required to bridge our knowledge about their synthesis, growth mechanisms, and physical properties to facilitate their application to renewable energy, catalysis and a great many other fields,” Paul Alivisatos, director of the Berkeley Lab, said in a press release.
The technique is called SINGLE, which stands for 3D Structure Identification of Nanoparticles by Graphene Liquid Cell Electron Microscopy, researchers said.
The goal of researchers was to understand how nanoparticles grow. Normally, images of nanoparticles are taken after they have fully grown and been removed from solutions. The major challenge of photographing nanoparticles while still in solution is that they move around, leading the combination of three other technologies in order to generate the images.
Researchers used a beam of electrons to illuminate the area for photography instead of light because, however electron beams are generally used in a vacuum because molecules in the air can disrupt the beam. Liquids evaporate quickly in a vacuum, so researchers had to then employ hermetically sealed containers, called cells, that have a thin viewing window allowing for the imaging.
Finally, to combat the issue of nanoparticles moving in the solution, the researchers used electron detectors that produce movies with millisecond frame-to-frame time resolution of the rotating nanocrystals.
The combination of the three allowed for thousands of two-dimensional images of the rotational motions of individual nanoparticles of platinum less than two nanometers in diameter to then be taken and reconstructed into 3D images.
“In materials science, we cannot assume the nanoparticles in a solution are all identical, so we needed to develop a hybrid approach for reconstructing the 3D structures of individual nanoparticles,” said Peter Ercius, a staff scientist with the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at the Molecular Foundry.
The study is published in Science.
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