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FEI, FOM join together to see and process single-atom stuff |
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Dec 19, 2007 at 01:04 PM |
FEI and the Dutch-based Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter announced that they have partnered up, not only to see single-atom-scale materials but to figure out how to process those materials as well.
During the course of the five-year, 2.7 million Euro project, the instrument company and FOM (pronounced like "foam," according to FEI's Dan Zenka) will work on advancing electron microscopy and focused ion beam systems technology to "harness their full potential" in physics and biology, and also study the fundamentals of how electron beams, ion beams, laser light, and matter interact, to drive future commercial innovations in the e-beam 'scope/FIB space.
A quote from Frank de Jong, FEI's research and technology director, caught my attention. "Beyond making [atomic-level] structures visible, we need to make the transition from static to moving images. Five years from now, we want to be able not only to change an atomic structure but also to see it happening (emphasis added). This will require new breakthroughs in both knowledge and technology and the range of skills that this effort requires is vast."
The ability to "see" down to the atomic scale is challenging enough, in terms of beam/image resolution and the like. But the idea of being able to watch, record, and analyze highly complex subangstrom-scale changes as they happen, in a robust, reliable and useful way, will indeed necessitate some pretty hefty innovation/invention. Just the amount of data coming from such streaming nanoimages is mind boggling, let alone using those data to help process something in more or less real time.
When asked about any looming fundamental limits in metrology and measurement on the horizon, Darlene Solomon, Agilent's CTO, responded after her Small Times NanoCon keynote last month: "If you're willing to spend money, you can get to those limits." She noted that it was less about pushing the detection limits of physics and more about the idea of adding better sample preparation, more biological and chemical specificity, and more powerful informatics, so that the whole workflow could "push forward by a factor of 10." "Working in a more integrated fashion is the key," according to the chief technologist.
FEI, FOM, and other organizations working to squeeze every photon and electron of capability out of the measurement tools, drive down the limits of detection, and truly get comfortable at the single-atom and subatomic scales will need many integrated/converged/multidisciplinary/hyphenated approaches to achieve their goals.
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