All That Matters

It become pretty much a routine, albeit an expensive one, to use transmission electron microscopes for imaging atoms in a crystal. But what has often been missing from those images is a crucial bit of information, the identity of the chemical element that has been looked at. Of course, the grey scales in the contrast of the different atoms do provide some information on the identity of an atom – at least as long as it was already known what kind of crystal is imaged. A more detailed and flexible elemental analysis, however, has been difficult. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Knut Urban from the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany and colleagues now report an improved energy-filtering technique that is able to do a full elemental mapping on the atomic scale. […]