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Center for Nanoscale Materials’ milestones and game-changing innovations
Video introducing the Center for Nanoscale Materials
Testimonials from Center for Nanoscale Materials’ users and researchers
Combinatorial Synthesis with WANDA
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
WANDA, or the Workstation for Automated Nanomaterial Discovery and Analysis, is developed, enabling researchers to take a combinatorial approach to the synthesis of colloidal inorganic nanomaterials in a high-throughput, reproducible manner.
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/04/26/wanda/
Development of Upconverting Nanoparticles
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Using WANDA, a multidisciplinary team of Molecular Foundry scientists develop upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) that would lead to significantly smaller and brighter probes for single-molecule imaging.
Scientists Create Continuously Emitting Microlasers with Nanoparticle-Coated Beads
TEAM Microscope
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
The world-leading 0.5 Å resolution aberration-corrected electron microscope is developed at NCEM, which would later lead to groundbreaking Molecular Foundry research in atomic resolution imaging. The TEAM 0.5 microscope was recently upgraded with a new detector that can take images at 91,000 frames per second.
Major discoveries with TEAM microscope:
- Berkeley Scientists Produce First Live Action Movie of Individual Carbon Atoms in Action
- A Most Singular Nano-Imaging Technique: Berkeley Lab’s SINGLE Provides Images of Individual Nanoparticles in Solution
- Big Data at the Atomic Scale: New Detector Reaches New Frontier in Speed
3D Electron Tomography
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Using the TEAM microscope, teams of users and staff at the Molecular Foundry develop a new technique able to measure the 3D position of individual atoms:
- Researchers Reveal Atomic Structure of Nanoparticle in Unprecedented Detail
- 3D Structure of Inorganic Nanocrystals in Solution by Transmission Electron Microscopy
Discovery of Peptoid Nanostructures
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Molecular Foundry researchers discover the self-assembly of peptoid nanostructures, which would lead to diverse future projects spanning biomedicine, defense and the science of assembly.
- Modular Design of Ordered Polymer-Nanoparticle Composites
- Unprecedented Precise Determination of the 3D Positions of Individual Atoms
Campanile Probe
Working across facilities, Molecular Foundry scientists develop the award-winning Campanile tip, a nano-optical probe capable of imaging well below the diffraction limit of light:
Smart Windows
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Research into electrochromic nanocrystals culminates in the development of Smart Windows, a technology that is highlighted on the cover of Nature and leads to the creation of the company Heliotrope: Raising the IQ of Smart Windows
UV photoresist
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Collaborating with leaders in the semiconductor industry and the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a new approach to extreme UV (EUV) photoresist is created that achieves both high-resolution and high-sensitivity. Source: Fundamental Chemistry Findings Could Help Extend Moore’s Law
Low-temperature probe opens new frontier in nanophysics
(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)
The discoveries of superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect and the fractional quantum Hall effect were all the result of measurements made at increasingly lower temperatures. Pushing the regime of the very cold into the very small, NIST researchers and their collaborators designed and built the most advanced ultra-low temperature scanning probe microscope (ULTSPM) in the world (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/12/nists-new-scanning-probe-microscope-supercool).
The ULTSPM operated at lower temperatures and higher magnetic fields than any other similar microscope, capabilities that enabled the device to resolve energy levels separated by as small as 1 millionth of an electron volt. This extraordinary resolution has already resulted in the discovery of new physics (see "Puzzling New Physics from Graphene Quartet's Quantum Harmonies").
"To get these kinds of measurements, you need to combine coarse and extremely fine movement (the mechanical positioning of a probe tip about two atoms' distance from the sample surface), ultra-high vacuum, cryogenics and vibration isolation," says NIST Fellow Joseph Stroscio, one of the device's co-creators. "We designed this instrument to achieve superlative levels of performance, which, in turn, requires achieving nearly the ultimate in environmental control."
The ability to create these kinds of experimental conditions, five years in the making, continues to open up new frontiers in nanoscale physics. (https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-scanning-tunneling-microscope, https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/designing-advanced-scanning-probe-microscopy-instruments).
Extending the ability of atomic force microscopes to study surfaces
(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)
NIST researchers developed on-chip optomechanical sensors for atomic force microscopy (AFM) that extend the range of mechanical properties found in commercial AFM cantilevers, potentially enabling the use of this technology to study a wide variety of physical systems. AFM is an important tool for surface metrology that measures local tip-surface interactions by scanning a flexible cantilever probe over a surface, but the bulky free-space optical system commonly used to sense the motion of the probe imposes limits on the tool's sensitivity and versatility (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2012/10/researchers-develop-versatile-optomechanical-sensors-atomic-force).
Previously, the NIST team had demonstrated an alternate, chip-scale sensing platform but the stiffness of the cantilever’s spring was fixed at a moderate value. In practice, however, the stiffness may need to be much smaller (for studying soft materials or in weak force detection) or much larger (for high-resolution imaging). In the new work, the researchers show that the spring stiffness can in fact vary over four orders of magnitude without sacrificing their high displacement sensitivity and measurement response times that are hundreds of times faster than commercial cantilevers with similar spring stiffness.
NIST researchers calibrate the optical microscope to measure nanoscale details with new accuracy
(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered that the optical microscope can be used to detect, track and image objects much smaller than their traditional limit—about half the wavelength of visible light, or a few hundred nanometers. That discovery gave researchers a new tool to track proteins in fertilized eggs, visualize how molecules form electrical connections between nerve cells in the brain, and study the nanoscale motion of miniature motors.
New research at NIST enables the microscopes to measure these nanometer-scale details with a new level of accuracy. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2018/05/nist-puts-optical-microscope-under-microscope-achieve-atomic-accuracy). Because optical microscopes have not traditionally been used to study the nanometer scale, they typically lack the calibration—comparison to a standard to check that a result is correct—necessary to obtain information that is accurate at that scale. A microscope may be precise, consistently indicating the same position for a single molecule or nanoparticle. Yet, at the same time, it can be highly inaccurate—the location of the object identified by the microscope to within a billionth of a meter may, in fact, be millionths of a meter off due to unaccounted-for errors.
To address the problem, NIST scientists developed a new calibration process that closely examines and corrects these imaging errors. The process uses reference materials—objects with characteristics that are well-known and stable—that have the potential for mass production and widespread distribution to individual laboratories. The technique could allow individual researchers to perform calibrations in their own laboratories, potentially improving by a factor of 10,000 the ability of optical microscopes to accurately locate the position of single molecules and nanoparticles.
The gold standard for bio-nanotech research
(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)
In 2008, NIST issued the first reference standards for nanoscale particles targeted for the biomedical research community—literally "gold standards" for labs studying the biological effects of nanoparticles. The three new materials, gold spheres nominally 10, 30 and 60 nanometers in diameter, were developed in cooperation with the National Cancer Institute's Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory (NCL). As the U.S. National Metrology Institute, NIST plays a critical role in providing well-characterized reference materials for use in a measurement process, for example to verify the performance of an analytic technique used during the manufacture of cancer drugs. Since 2008, the reference materials (RM 8011, 8012 and 8013) have been consistent sellers and had to be reissued 2 years ahead of projections.
