Physicists Succeed in Filming Phase Transition with Extremely High Spatial and Temporal Resolution
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Laser beams can be used to change the properties of materials in an extremely precise way. This principle is already widely used in technologies such as rewritable DVDs. However, the underlying processes generally take place at such unimaginably fast speeds and at such a small scale that they have so far eluded direct observation. Researchers at the University of Gottingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen have now managed to film, for the first time, the laser transformation of a crystal structure with nanometre resolution and in slow motion in an electron microscope. The results have been published in the journal Science.
[...] In their experiments, the researchers induced this phase transition with short laser pulses and recorded a film of the charge-density wave reaction. "What we observe is the rapid formation and growth of tiny regions where the material was switched to the next phase," explains first author Thomas Danz from Gottingen University. "The ultrafast transmission electron microscope developed in Gottingen offers the highest time resolution for such imaging in the world today." The special feature of the experiment lies in a newly developed imaging technique, which is particularly sensitive to the specific changes observed in this phase transition. The Gottingen physicists use it to take images that are composed exclusively of electrons that have been scattered by the crystal's waviness.
Journal Reference:
Thomas Danz, Till Domrose, Claus Ropers. Ultrafast nanoimaging of the order parameter in a structural phase transition [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd2774)
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