Sheffield Scientists Have Revolutionized the Electron Microscope 90
An anonymous reader writes "For over 70 years, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which 'looks through' an object to see atomic features within it, has been constrained by the relatively poor lenses which are used to form the image. The new method, called electron ptychography, dispenses with the lens and instead forms the image by reconstructing the scattered electron-waves after they have passed through the sample using computers. Scientists involved in the scheme consider their findings to be a first step in a completely new epoch of electron imaging. The process has no fundamental experimental boundaries and it is thought it will transform sub-atomic scale transmission imaging."
original article (Score:4, Interesting)
took me forever to find it, but here is the original article behind the Nature paywall
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n3/full/ncomms1733.html [nature.com]
the paper feels like it written by the marketing department for his company.
Re:Does anyone understand it? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is transmission electron microscopy (not SEM), where electrons are shot through the sample. It's kind of like a standard light microscope where the light goes through the sample and you see the shadow.
What they're doing is reconstructing an image from diffraction patterns instead of focusing it with a lens. I think it's vaguely similar to interferometry. They can apparently also do it with light microscopes, which has certain advantages. Unfortunately the article mixes up the electron and light microscopy - you don't do TEM on living cells, for example, no matter how fancy an imaging system you have.