Introduction

Lawrence Berkeley National Labs just turned on a $27 million electron microscope. Its ability to make images to a resolution of half the width of a hydrogen atom makes it the world’s  most powerful microscope.

The following KQED production was produced in high definition.

What could be more human than the desire to decode the mysteries of the world around us? In this pursuit, we’ve pointed our devices not only to the heavens above, but also to the smallest things below.

If you want a sense of how far we’ve come in our yearning to see the invisible, a good place to start is the Golub Collection, nearly 100 antique microscopes from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries housed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Steven ruzin

Steven ruzin (Curator,The Golub collection,UK Berkeley) says-“They’re beautiful. They are hand made. They’re really individual microscopes. They were covered in vellum or they’re covered in fish skin. They were hand stamped with gold leaf.

When microscopes were first invented, they looked at anything and everything. They looked at bugs. Looked at plants. They looked at one of the favorite things was pond scum. One of the things that the microscopists looked at were sperm cells. And they realized that sperm cells had something to do with reproduction. And so they imagined little curled up people inside of them.”

Early microscopes led 17th century scientists, like Englishman Robert Hooke to important discoveries, like the cell. But these unsophisticated devices couldn’t save early researchers from reaching some hilarious conclusions.In the 300 years since, the size of what scientists can see has shrunk considerably from tiny animals to individual cells to chromosomes.

And now as of January of  2021 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, researchers are actually able to count individual atoms, even the smallest ones.

Welcome to the world’s most powerful microscope. This Department of Energy electron microscope cost $27 million. It can view objects twice as small as the last generation of the world’s most powerful microscopes.

Ulrich Dahman

Ulrich Dahman (Director, Nat’l center for electron microscope) says – “It’s a big beast in a big box. Everybody was worried that somehow it would be droped or it wouldn’t quite fit in through the side of the building. So it took all day to get this machine in here. It was hoisted up into its own room on a crane. And its power cable is as thick as a fire hose. 300,000 volts goes up into the gun. The electrons are accelerate and that gets them up to near the speed of light.”

At that speed, the electrons behave like waves with very short wavelengths. An electron microscope can make images of much smaller things than a light microscope because electrons have much shorter wavelengths than light.

The walls of the National Center for Electron Microscopy are decorating with photos of the materials that have been image there. It’s a view into the nano world where things are hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the width of a hair.

Ulrich Dahman says

Ulrich Dahman says-“This is actually our best image. This is the best that this microscope can do now. It’s a sheet of carbon atoms that is just one atom thick. It’s the thinnest non object you can make.

Each one of these atoms is bond very strongly to its nearest neighbors and they form this hexagonal honeycomb structure. This is your starting focus? You’re just setting the starting focus now? Something like that.”

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 This sheet of carbon atoms might one day replace silicon to make computers dramatically faster and smaller. Other materials Dahman and his colleagues are studying also hold great promise.

The aluminum alloy they’re looking at today could one day be use to build a spaceship to Mars. In the past, aluminum alloys have suffered catastrophic failures brought on by tiny atomic wrinkles that spread through the aluminum and caused cracking.

That’s why researchers are continuously in search for combinations of metals to mix in with the aluminum. These clumps of metals, called precipitates, serve as a barrier against cracking.

Ulrich Dahman

Ulrich Dahman says-“So this one here is aluminum. And this one here is a precipitate. We know these are the copper atoms here. That is quite clear. And everybody agrees. But there’s some controversy on whether this is aluminum and that is magnesium or whether this is magnesium and that is aluminum. And basically, that’s what we want to find out. It’s very delicate.”

Figuring out the precipitate’s precise atomic structure is essential in order to later test its strength.

“So one of the most important things in all of this to get the sample into the right orientation so that you’re looking down a row of atoms. And it can’t be tilted. If the row of atoms is slightly tilted, then you’ll wash out the resolution. And see what we have. Promising. The orientation looks good.”

Surprisingly, the basic structure of this microscope hearkens back to the 18th century.

Steven ruzin

Steven ruzin says – “This microscope is functionally identical to an electron microscope. It has a light source. An electron microscope has an electron source, which is a filament.

It has a condenser system, which would condense the dispersed rays of light or to disperse electrons from the filament of the electron microscope down into the column and onto the sample. And in our case here, the light is condense through this lens and is transmitte through the sample, just like an electron microscope.

This microscope has an objective lens here, the primary magnification lens. An electron lens has the same thing. The difference, of course, is that for an electron microscope the lenses are magnetic fields and electromagnets. And in a light microscope like this here, the lenses are, of course, made out of glass. But they both cause a bending or a refraction of the rays or the electrons, whatever the case may be.”

 But unfortunately, the bending light rays or electron beams that magnify an object also can make two objects difficult to distinguish from each other. The phenomenon that causes this blurring is call spherical aberration.

Steven ruzin says

Steven ruzin says – “It has to do with the rays of light that travel through the middle versus the rays of light that travel through the edges of a spherical surface of a lens, focusing it at two different or multiple points in the image plane up in the body. That multiple focus point of the light going through the objective decreases resolution and makes a blurry image.”

An electron microscope corrects spherical aberration by using magnetic fields to bend the electron beams. And that requires a very stable electrical current.

Ulrich Dahman

Ulrich Dahman says – “So in this rack here, we have the power supplies for the correctors. So each of these power supplies has a very high stability, very modern electronic system.”

Overcoming spherical aberration is what has made the Berkeley microscope’s incredible atomic resolution possible. And that’s where it gets its name. The device is call the TEAM microscope, which stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-Corrected microscope.

“ I think we are close. This is a [INAUDIBLE] magnesium should be in this position here and in this position here. And this should be aluminum here. It looks pretty promising to me.”

Conclusion

Even so, this microscope isn’t perfect. In October of 2009, the center will unveil the next version of the TEAM, which will allow scientists to put their materials under stresses, like heat or pressure and watch the results in real time.

Steven ruzin says – “The human need is the need to understand the physical world, to understand where we are and what we’re doing and how it exists back at the beginning of microscopy. They did the best they could. But they could see a limited amount. And invention– that’s what humans do is they invent things and they make machines better and more versatile.”

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