Artist’s impression of the charge density wave in the ultrafast transmission electron microscope. Photo: Dr Florian Sterl (Sterltech Optics)
Artist's impression of the charge density wave in the ultrafast transmission electron microscope. Photo: Dr Florian Sterl (Sterltech Optics) Physicists from Göttingen first to succeed in filming a phase transition with extremely high spatial and temporal resolution 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 . The team, which includes Thomas Danz and Professor Claus Ropers, took advantage of an unusual property of a material made up of atomically thin layers of sulphur and tantalum atoms.
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