Protochips

Are you interested in working with catalyst materials with in situ TEM? Join our Applications Scientist, Dr. Nynke Krans at the #NCCC conference next week! She will be giving a talk on Tuesday at 15h10 in the Boston 17-19 room on our newest #TritonAX system! The NCCC offers a unique, international forum to exchange innovative ideas between academic and industrial scientists in a broad area of catalysis and chemistry research and technology. Find out more about the conference here: https://hubs.li/Q039TbLl0

??Another Triton AX Installation - North Carolina State University Thank you so much to Prof. Raymond Unocic and team at North Carolina State University's Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF) at NC State for the wonderful hospitality during the #TritonAX installation this month! Now, Prof. Unocic's group is equipped with the completely unique capability of heating and cooling simultaneous to electrochemical reactions for creating relevant in situ environments within the TEM. We know this team will perform some truly impactful research that will benefit the scientific community in so many ways. The installation and training performed by our New Product Development Applications Engineer Dr. Katherine Marusak Stephens, Ph.D. alongside our New Product Development Manager Franklin Stampley Walden has left the team ready to hit the ground running. We will be here ready to support as you have questions and look forward to seeing you succeed! Read more about Triton AX and it's one-of-a-kind capabilities for heating and cooling in liquid here: https://hubs.li/Q036RFht0 Have a question or want a quote? Reach out to us here: https://hubs.li/Q036RCTd0 #nanoscience #nanotechnology #insitu #electronmicroscopy #electrochemistry #TEM #findyourbreakthrough

Tuesday publication post! ?? In this newest publication, from the #BrnoUniversityofTechnology, authors Peter Kepi? and others have looked into phase transformation of single VO? NPs using the #FusionAX system. They also used the #AXONSynchronicity software to capture the particle transformations! Vanadium dioxide (VO?) is a cornerstone material for nanophotonic metamaterials and next-gen memory devices, thanks to its reversible insulator–metal transition (IMT). While this transition has been studied extensively in thin films, the nanoscale dynamics of individual single-crystal VO? nanoparticles (NPs)—the fundamental building blocks of these systems—remain largely unexplored. What can we learn from this paper? ??The particles displayed a statistical distribution of transition temperature and steepness across heating and cooling cycles. ?? It was seen that there was a stability of coexisting phases, crucial for memory applications. ??Lastly, persistent multilevel memory behavior at near-room temperature was observed, using just a few VO? NPs. By resolving these nanoscale hysteresis dynamics, tunable optoelectronic and memory devices can be synthesized with enhanced functionalities. Want to read the entire paper? Find it here! https://hubs.li/Q036KzvS0 In the video we can see STEM ADF images of the VO2 particles, undergoing heating and cooling behavior. #Protochips #FindYourBreakthrough #ElectronicDeviceResearch

??The last webinar of the series is here! Join us Thursday the 6th of March at 9:00am EST for the last installment of the Fusion AX: ?Amp Up Your Devices webinar series featuring Dr. Tolga Wagner from the Humbolt University, Berlin, Germany. ???? In this webinar, Dr. Wagner will explore recent advances in operando electron microscopy, focusing on the integration of focused ion beam (FIB) techniques for precise sample preparation and electrical biasing in switching devices. By employing time-resolved electron microscopy methods such as interference gating (iGate) and dynamic differential phase contrast (DPC), he investigated the dynamic potential distribution during device switching events, with temporal resolutions down to 1 ns! If you study electronic devices and interested in adding in situ TEM techniques to your experimental repertoire, you won’t want to miss this! Register here for this episode: https://hubs.li/Q02XTPhg0

Another new episode in the #FlashTalk series: Episode 25! This flash talk discusses how recent advances in liquid phase scanning transmission electron microscopy (LP-STEM) are overcoming challenges like sample thickness and beam damage to revolutionize live-cell imaging. Using graphene encapsulation and advanced imaging techniques with the #AXONSynchronicity software, Dr. Brian Caffrey, PhD, AFHEA of the Rosalind Franklin Institute shows details of cellular ultrastructure, demonstrated with the resilient bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. Watch this flash talk to learn how LP-STEM is opening new frontiers in biological research! Watch the episode here! https://hubs.li/Q035NlSz0 #Protochips #InSituEM #BiologicalMaterials #FindYourBreakthrough

Tuesday publication update! ?? This published research from the #KarlsruheInstituteofTechnology focuses on novel technique for local hydrogen concentration detection in metals.The #AtmosphereAX system was used to do in situ gas phase scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). ??Measured hydrogen concentration in cubic palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs) with a lateral resolution of 4 nm using STEM and energy electron loss spectroscopy (EELS). ??It was possible to do real-time tracking of hydrogenation and dehydrogenation processes by analyzing the shift in the Pd bulk plasmon peak during in situ TEM experiments. ?? The authors linked local hydrogen concentration with microstructure and strain, providing a comprehensive understanding of material behavior during hydrogen interactions. ?This method enables a deeper understanding of hydrogen-related phenomena such as storage, detection, catalysis, and embrittlement, offering a powerful tool for optimizing materials in hydrogen technology. Congratulations to Svetlana Korneychuk, Stefan Wagner, Darius Rohleder, Philipp Vana, and Astrid Pundt for this great publication! Want to read the entire work? Find it here! https://hubs.li/Q033TcQs0 Want to know more about doing #Catalysis work using the Atmosphere AX system? https://hubs.li/Q033Tcv20 #Protochips #InSituMicroscopy #FindYourBreakthrough

?? New Triton AX Installation at the University of Liverpool! Thank you so much to Prof. B. Layla Mehdi, Dr. , and the team at the University of Liverpool for being such amazing hosts during the installation and training on the new #TritonAX system! They are now one of the first few labs in the world to have the capability of both cooling and heating in liquid simultaneous to electrochemical measurements for relevant in situ TEM measurements. With the help of our Global Service Manager Daniel Frank and our New Product Development Manager Franklin Stampley Walden, the Liverpool team is already performing experiments and we cannot wait to see the results that come out of your lab. Read more about Triton AX and it's one-of-a-kind capabilities for heating and cooling in liquid here: https://hubs.li/Q036RFgq0 Have a question or want a quote? Reach out to us here: https://hubs.li/Q036RD280 #nanoscience #nanotechnology #insitu #electronmicroscopy #electrochemistry #TEM #findyourbreakthrough

Nanoparticles often undergo thermally driven phase transitions and shape shifting spatial transformation resulting in a thermodynamically stable structures at that temperature. In case of crystalline nanoparticles, these transformations are usually anisotropic, meaning that they are surface dependent. This surface dependency of anisotropic phase transitions is attributed to the work function, surface energy and chemical potential of different crystal facets. When heated, these structures become unstable and begin to transform to an isotropic structure with high thermodynamic stability at a large range of temperature. Investigating these structural phase transitions at atomic scale may provide why some catalysts work terribly at high temperatures and why some catalysts fail to reactivate by thermal treatment. Researchers from Institute for basic science (IBS) have used environmental transmission electron microscopy (ETEM) to observe these structural transformations and geometric shape shifts in gold nanoparticles at atomic scale using phase-contrast microscopy. They studied two types of gold nanoparticles, gold nanorods and triangular gold nanoplates. Above 180°C at 1 mbar O?, surface encapsulating thiol ligands underwent surface desorption exposing the gold surfaces to the oxygen environment. In absence of any surface stabilizing ligands, surfaces atoms started to diffuse around transforming the gold nanoparticles to more thermodynamically stable structures. Nanorods were found to transform to nanoellipsoids whereas nanotriangles were found to transform to nanohexagons through the truncation of their vertices. However, the mechanisms of surface atom diffusion are different in these two cases. In case of nanorods, indiscriminate surface migration of vertex atoms to the sides was found to be driven by the formation of multiple intermediate high-index facets; on the other hand, selective layer-by-layer migration of vertex atoms to the triangular faces was found to have occurred in case of nanotriangles until a hexagonal shape is attained. The thermodynamic driving force here is the minimization of the low-coordinated gold surface atoms that anticipates the final spherical shape of the particles. The triangular geometry of the nanotriangles allowed the {111} surfaces on all faces remain intact during the transition to hexagonal geometry. ETEM experiments were conducted on an aberration-corrected Thermo Fisher Scientific Titan ETEM G2 operated at 300?keV and equipped with a Gatan Inc. UltraScan 1000XP CCD detector. In-situ heating inside the microscope was conducted with a Protochips Fusion in-situ heating TEM holder. Video description is in the comments. Read the interesting findings published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. https://lnkd.in/dPHrTx2C #phasetreansitions #surfaceatomdiffusion #phasecontrast #insituTEM #ETEM #Fusion #UltraScan1000XP #electronmicroscopy

Did you miss the webinar held together with #EPFL? Two weeks ago, our Senior Applications Scientist, Dr. Madeline Dressel Dukes, held an exciting online webinar 'In Situ Liquid Transmission Electron Microscopy: An Essential Tool for Studying Dynamic Processes at the Nanoscale'. She talked about the recent advances in liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy (LC-TEM) using the #PoseidonAX system, and how these studies have been applied to systems such as nanoparticle nucleation and growth, biological systems, corrosion, battery cycling and electrocatalysis, enhancing our understanding of the underlying mechanistic processes that control a materials’ bulk behaviour. Want to watch it? Find it here! https://lnkd.in/etAdw3wk

Tuesday publication post! ?? This publication from Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin and the Technische Universit?t Berlin focuses on ultrafast time-resolved electron holography using Interference Gating (iGate), a technique that combines simplicity with unmatched precision for investigating high-speed electronic processes. They use the #FusionAX system to observe biasing phenomena through holography on an ultrafast switching silicon diode. ?With this technique the authors achieved nanometer spatial and nanosecond temporal resolution (25 ns) with a 3 MHz repetition rate, enabling dynamic observations of local electric potentials. ??It was possible to visualize time-dependent potential distributions in the space-charge region of a silicon diode during switching between unbiased and reverse-biased states. ??Complementary static and dynamic experiments confirm strong alignment between modeled and measured projected potentials. The authors show that iGate transforms operando investigations of semiconductor devices, opening new possibilities for nanoscale imaging of high-speed electronic processes. With this level of precision, researchers can better understand and optimize next-gen semiconductor technology. Congratulations on the great work Tolga Wagner, Hüseyin ?elik, Simon Gaebel, Dirk Berger, Peng-Han Lu, H?usler Ines, Nina Owschimikow, @Michael Lehmann, Rafal Dunin-Borkowski, Christoph T. Koch, and Fariba Hatami! Want to read the entire work? Find it here! https://hubs.li/Q033TcBr0 #Protochips #FindYourBreakthrough #ElectronicDeviceResearch