NEWSROOM

The new method, inspired by an imaging technique that has been around for 35 years, takes ultraprecise measurements of a molecule’s unique light-emission signature at the scale of a billionth of a second. It uses a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) camera made up of close to a million tiny sensors that can each detect aphoton. The data are analyzed to determine a molecule’s fluorescence lifetime – or the extremely short delay between an excitation laser pulse and the fluor

Now, writing in the journal Nature Communications, a team led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory report how they used ultrafast X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), combined with recent theoretical advancements, to reveal those atomic motions on a timescale of femtoseconds, millionths of a billionth of a second. The technique could be used to observe speedy atomic motions in more complex catalysts.

“We now have a way for people to interact with a detector on one side and a supercomputer on the other side with a simple webpage called Distiller in the middle,” said Peter Ercius, interim facility director of the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry. “We’re moving towards getting huge amounts of data processed in an automated way with minimal human intervention.”

Plasma is a super-hot mixture of charged particles, such as ions and electrons, which can conduct electricity and are influenced by magne...

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, including STED (Stimulated Emis

(a) Selected ground truth HAADF-STEM multislice image simulations. Scale bars are 1 nm. (b) Corresponding synthetic multislice images...