Posts Tagged ‘microscopy’
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January 13th, 2010
Seeing through gold
Chemical and Engineering News is reporting that thin layers of evaporated gold are being used to help study the layer-dependent surface property of graphene. Advances in graphene technology have been hampered by the small number of microscopy and spectroscopy techniques capable of “seeing” graphene and distinguishing between samples of various thicknesses. The research from the National Center for Nanoscience & Technology, in Beijing has been published in JACS.
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September 16th, 2009
Watching ‘molecular gears’ in action
I came across this paper in Nature Materials, and was struck by the imagery contained within. By means of a brief summary, the team (led by Christian Joachim at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore) manipulated a snowflake-shaped molecule (hexa-t-butyl-pyrimidopentaphenylbenzene for the chemists amongst you) until it was balanced on top of a defect on a gold sheet. From here the researchers were able to use the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope to effectively rotate the molecule in a controlled fashion. Could such ‘gears’ be the components of molecular machines of the future…?
Whilst we are on the subject of such imaging marvels, I’d like to draw your attention to this recent science paper. Many of you will probably have seen it already as it received broad media coverage, but I am still staggered every time I see the images. I personally spent 3 years working with the instrument used in the paper (the Atomic Force Microscope) so can imagine what the authors went through to obtain such data. I take my hat off to them….
Richard Holliday
Trevor Keel
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