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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 Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen 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 Göttingen University. "The ultrafast transmission electron microscope developed in Göttingen 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 Göttingen 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 Domröse, Claus Ropers. Ultrafast nanoimaging of the order parameter in a structural phase transition [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd2774)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Tuesday January 26 2021, @05:03AM (4 children)
Where the picture?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @05:44AM
Right there. But since it was "nano-imaging", it is easy to miss. There it was, again!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @07:39AM
Agreed. Pics or it didn't happen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 26 2021, @08:22AM (1 child)
The images are in the scientific article. Of which there is a non-paywalled version here. [arxiv.org]
It should be standard procedure for the editors whenever a link to a paywalled scientific article is given, to also check whether there's a free version on arXiv (especially in physics, there most often is) and add that, too.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 26 2021, @12:36PM
Thanks for the link! Watched the movies (opened in VLC with no problems), pretty hard to understand what they show--dots appear and disappear...
The link also answered my first question, what material was used for the experiments:
Can anyone translate this into plain English?