Berkeley Lab Debuts “The Best Microscope in The World”
A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully installed the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope.
TEAM 0.5, as the device is known, produces high contrast images with half-angstrom, or half a 10-billionth of a meter, resolution. The state-of-the-art microscope continuously adjusts and corrects spherical aberrations so scientists can study detailed 3D images of tiny atoms and nanoparticles which appear on a large screen that looks like a high-definition TV.
New technology incorporated in the microscope’s design allows it to display the sample being studied with remarkable clarity even when lower energy electron beams are being used — an important innovation that offers many potential benefits for cancer researchers. As TEAM’s project director explained,
“Low energy electrons have longer wavelengths, so they are harder to focus. Aberration correction allows better than one-angstrom resolution with excellent contrast even at 80 kilovolts. This is important when you don’t want to damage the sample with a high-energy beam – in biological studies, for example.”
Uli Dahmen
National Center for Electron Microscopy
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
TEAM 0.5 is a collaborative project involving the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and two private electron microscopy companies, FEI Company (NASDAQ: FEIC) and CEOS.
Physicists are completing adjustments on TEAM 0.5 and the lab hopes to make the equipment available to outside research projects by October 2008.
If you’d like to learn more about scientific research being conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, you can visit their website at www.lbl.gov.
Source: Berkeley Lab Research News
Related Links: Inside Bay Area; Science Quick Picks; UPI
Related Podcast: An Audio Review of Microscopy at Neuroscience 2007 by Microscopy and Analysis from Analytical Science Podcasts
Technorati Tags: Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microsope; nanotechnology; nanomedicine; nanoscience; Portland, Oregon; Heidelberg, Germany; University of California
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