Delivering New Capabilities for In Situ, Molecular-Scale Imaging
Nickelblock: An Element's Love-hate Relationship with Battery Electrodes
Anyone who owns an electronic device knows that lithium-ion batteries could work better and last longer. Now, scientists examining battery materials on the nano-scale reveal how nickel forms a physical barrier that impedes the shuttling of lithium ions in the electrode, reducing how fast the materials charge and discharge. Published last week in Nano Letters, the research also suggests a way to improve the materials. (October 2012)
Ajay Karakoti Receives 2011 MT Thomas Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Achievement
Congratulations to Dr. Ajay Karakoti! He garnered the honor in recognition of his "insightful and creative contributions to the visualization of functionalized nanoparticle surfaces," said Robby Robinson, chair of the award selection committee. The committee noted Karakoti demonstrated EMSL's interdisciplinary research focus by applying his scientific inquiry to biology, toxicity, materials science, chemistry, and physics by the careful and meticulous characterization of nanomaterials. (August 2012)
Team Wins 2012 Innovation Award
Congratulations to the team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Hummingbird Scientific on receiving a Microscopy Today 2012 Innovation Award. The award honors groundbreaking imaging products and methods. The honorees are Jun Liu, Chongmin Wang, Don Baer, Suntharampillai (Theva) Thevuthasan, Wu Xu and Jiguang (Jason) Zhang from PNNL; and Daan Hein Alsem and Norman Salmon from Hummingbird Scientific. (August 2012)
Charging Up To Build a Better Battery
EMSL develops new imaging capabilities to better understand batteries
It's been said, build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. When it comes to energy issues, building a better battery could bring the world to your door. Using resources at EMSL, imaging scientists are committed to improving electrochemical energy storage devices. Today's devices are not powerful enough, require frequent recharging, have to be periodically replaced, and are expensive to produce. To help solve these problems and others, scientists need to understand how batteries work and why they gradually wear out.
(August 2012)
Listening to Life
Once impossible, scientists can now eavesdrop on microbes, thanks to a new technique from scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and three universities. Microbes converse by releasing simple and complex molecules, called metabolites. The metabolites interact with and alter their environment and nearby cells. To listen in, the team combined nanospray desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, or nanoDESI, and a new bioinformatics technique. (July 2012)
The Moment
It's sort of a pop-culture cliché: a scientist or scientific team pours heart, soul, and countless hours into a project-nearly to the point of obsession—until The Moment arrives. The first result comes; the instrument works; the data make sense; the code does its job. Whatever the exact fabric of The Moment, it's exactly what the scientist was hoping for—or it's unexpected in an even more interesting way. (July 2012)
Researchers have long wanted to "see" chemical, materials, and biochemical processes, in time and space, with enough detail to determine what is occurring at the molecular level. But, they lack the tools to reach this level of clarity. Instead, they must infer what is happening from secondary sources and mathematical models.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is developing the tools and techniques to generate images of chemicals, materials, and biological molecules at the nanometer scale through its Chemical Imaging Initiative. (A nanometer is the length of two hydrogen atoms side by side.)
Achieving molecular-scale clarity requires molecules to be examined in situ—exactly as they are rather than in an intermediate state. Data from two or more experimental tools are needed to adequately describe the molecules, so computational tools are being developed to integrate the data streams.
This level of information will allow scientists and engineers to move from observing chemical, materials, and biological processes to controlling them.
Technical challenges include the following
Develop light-source-based x-ray and vacuum ultraviolet probes coupled with laboratory-based imaging capabilities for three-dimensional tomographic, structural, and element-specific molecular-level probes that would significantly enhance imaging capabilities. Use of these new techniques, for example, could potentially provide an atomic-resolution, in situ "movie" of a functioning photocatalyst or clear characterizations of nanoporous materials and their active sites for batteries and biomolecules.
Develop coupled optical, electron, ion, and scanned probe microscopies to understand chemical and biological transformations and mechanisms. Use of these new techniques could produce useful insights into the mineral-fluid interface in supercritical CO2 or the lifecycle of molecular machinery in microorganisms and microbial communities, among others.
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