Scientists film exploding nanoparticles

05 February, 2016

Imaging nanoscale dynamics with unparalleled detail and speed. Using a super X-ray microscope, an international research team has “filmed” the explosion of single nanoparticles. The team led by Tais Gorkhover from Technische Universität Berlin, currently working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. as a fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation, and Christoph Bostedt from the Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University has managed to combine a temporal resolution of 100 femtoseconds and a spatial resolution of eight nanometres for the first time.

A nanometre is a billionth of a metre, and a femtosecond is a mere quadrillionth of a second. For their experiments, the scientists used the so-called free-electron X-ray laser LCLS at SLAC. The exposure time of the individual images was so short that the rapidly moving particles in the gas phase appeared frozen in time. Therefore, they did not have to be fixed on substrates as it is commonly done in other microscopy approaches. The team, including researchers from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL at DESY, reports its results in the scientific journal Nature Photonics.

For more details see the DESY news article.

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