Hello everybody, my name is Kelly Christensen, I am a science and
technology writer here at Michigan Technological University. And today we
are going to show you the scanning and transmission electron microscope
facility, which is part of the applied chemical and morphological analysis
laboratory at the Advanced Technology and Development complex.
So we're gonna go outside for a second so that Steve Hackney can explain to you what exactly
we do in this awesome facility.
The kind of science that's going on, and what we
use this really cool technology for.
Take it away, Steve!
Hey! My name is Steve Hackney,
professor material science and engineering here at Michigan
Technological University.
And material science is all about figuring out what's
going on at a very fine scale inside of a material and being able to change that,
or engineer it to make the material better.
And here we take that to the
extreme we're trying to figure out what's going on at the atomic level
inside of the material and figure out how we can change that or engineer that
to build from there up to make the best possible material.
To do that we have to be able to see what's going on
at the atomic scale.
And to do that, we actually had to build a room completely separate from the rest of the campus
to find a place that was quiet enough, clean enough, low enough noise so that we could look
at the atoms without them moving around.
And so we ended up having to add this
onto the ATDC so that we could have a room that would be quiet enough that we
could see the atoms.
So let's go in and take a look.
[boots walking on snow]
So this room here houses the mechanical equipment that controls the environment
inside the room we have to have very stable temperature. If there's any
variation in temperature then the sample moves around and if you're looking at
atoms then you lose track of them if the samples move in so we have to have
enough equipment in here to keep the room temperature stable. And so
temperatures stable enough that we don't need any airflow inside the room to keep
the temperature from varying.
So let's go in and take a look at all the guys inside here.
[white noise]
So this is the air handler.
You think this would be for an eight story building,
but it's actually for a nine hundred square foot facility.
And it's this big in order to
keep the temperature extremely stable.
Over here, we've got water chillers.
This water comes from a system up on the roof that keeps the temperature constant for
water to flow through the microscope to remove heat and also
goes through the cooling panels inside the room
And over here is our spare UPS system.
UPS system is back up power supply that
keeps the microscope running if the power ever to go off here at Michigan Tech
So the microscope facility itself is through here
Hi, I'm Owen Mills. I'm the director of the applied chemical and morphological
analysis laboratory. And this is one of the holders.
it's called a holder it's
what we use to put the sample inside of the microscope and as
you'll see in a minute, there's a three millimeter disc that sits inside that
opening. And this is called a tomography holder. And with this holder, we're able
to tilt to extreme angles and we can take a series of images while we're
tilting the sample, the specimen in the microscope, and then use a computer
software to put those images back together into a three-dimensional object
that we can use to understand better the relationship those structures inside the sample.
And this this copper disk is the sample holder, so it's a it's a plate with holes
in it and we put the sample on top of it it's three millimeters in diameter and
then that's what fits inside of this well on the sample holder.
Hi, I'm Pinaki Mukherjee.
I'm the specialist for this microscope.
I am newly appointed here as a scientist to experiments in electron microscopy.
So as well as sound– so this is the sample rod, you know where we put our samples so
this is the sample holder. You can see it's really small, it's three millimeter
in diameter and there are several ways of putting our samples here.
And remember, one thing that we see things in atomic resolution, so we see tiny tiny things.
And then, once we put our sample in that rod
And then we insert the rod inside the microscope here.
Then we start
looking into things right now I am looking into some gold nano islets
these islets are typically 5 to 50 nanometer in size and this is a
relatively low mag image. You can see I am only at 225 K X and I am
increasing the magnification now and you can see, I can see things more and more
clearly.
Right now I have around 1.3 million times Mac Mac and then ...
I'm trying to focus
on these nano islets to see
to see atom columns
[Voice off camera] Can you explain an atom column again?
okay let's let me show it first and then
I'm going to explain it in a minute.
Okay, so right now I am around 3.6 million
times magnification, so that's pretty amazing and you can see these skill bar
is about two nanometers and I can take that image
and at this point I can explain what is the atom columns are.
So atom columns are basically your all our material that we see around us, our 3-D materials,
so they are made up of atoms and they stack up in three dimensions in columns, okay?
So our in microscope the particles or the sample has to be thin, say of the
order of 50 nanometers so that the electrons can pass through those atom
columns and then we can image them
So in essence, the atom columns are 3D
stacking of atoms in in Greer crystalline material.
So here you can see
one real atom column at a time, and this is a gold nanoparticle and each of
those white dots, white circles, are one atom column.
[Voice off camera] And you said you can use this beyond imaging, but also for chemical analysis?
Exactly. So this microscope operates at TM and stem mode. The beauty of stem mode
is that it gives us a very small beam to raster through the sample so it's a
chemist and so we can do chemical analysis at the time I am taking the
image of atom column. So normally we can know what the actual distance between
that of columns, but we can know what are those atom columns are made up of.
Say one column is say cold on the column maybe island and something else, so we can tell that.
Apart from that we can tell also how these atoms are bonded and all these
in atomic scale. So that's that's the beauty of it and
Michigan Tech is one of the places where you can use this state-of-the-art microscope.
Not every place has atomic resolution imaging x-ray and yields, which is
electron energy mass spectroscopy at the same microscope.
It's very very unique.
[Voice off camera] "And you’re able to also test these materials
to see how atoms behave, you have
the ability to test them with water correct? Then also to put pressures on
them the different slides that you're able to use in the microscope?
Yes, so we call them in situ or in operate
the holders.
So we'd be the situation in
real life and then we put our samples in different kinds of holders say we put it
in a hitting stage we use electrical stage or a nano indenter. And sometimes
it's exactly it's the cell itself, a quasi cell, through which we can pass liquid and
see things in atomic resolution hopefully, if they survive under electron beams.
[Voice off camera] “And this facility isn’t just for Michigan Tech researchers, correct?”
No, it's for anyone who wants to use this unique expertise and I am here to
help them and we can work on wide range of materials starting from energy,
metallurgy, geology, chemistry, physics, and as we said that we can not only image we
can know the functions behind them say electrical properties and how the
structure is affected by that.
So we have a unique capability here
And I welcome everyone to use it through this video.
Thank you.