(ORDO NEWS) — To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open the shutter for about one four thousandth of a second.
To take a picture of atomic activity, you need a shutter that clicks frequently. faster.
Now scientists have come up with a way to achieve shutter speeds that are as little as one trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than digital cameras. This makes him able to capture something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.
Simply put, this is when clusters of atoms move and dance in a material in a certain way for a certain period of time caused by vibration. or temperature change, for example.
This is a phenomenon we do not yet fully understand, but it is critical to the properties and reactions of materials.
The new system of ultra-fast shutter speeds gives us much more information about what is happening with dynamic disorder.
The researchers call their invention the Variable Gate Atomic Pair Distribution Function, or vsPDF for short.
“It’s only with this new vsPDF tool that we can really see that side of materials,” says materials specialist Simon. Billinge of Columbia University in New York.
“With this technique, we will be able to observe the material and see which atoms are dancing and which are not.”
Faster shutter speeds produce a more accurate snapshot of time, which is useful for fast-moving objects such as rapidly shaking atoms.
Use a slow shutter speed, for example, when shooting a sports match, and you will get blurry images of the players in the frame.
To achieve this astoundingly fast image, vsPDF uses neutrons to measure the positions of atoms rather than conventional photography techniques.
The way neutrons enter and travel through a material can be monitored to measure surrounding atoms, with changes in energy levels being equivalent to adjusting a shutter speed.
These shutter speed changes are significant, as are trillionths of a second: they are vital for separating dynamic clutter from a related but different static clutter normal background fluctuating in place of atoms that don’t improve the function of the material.
“This gives us a whole new way to understand the intricacies of what’s going on in complex materials, the hidden effects that can enhance their properties,” says Billinge.
In this case, the researchers trained their neutron chamber on a material called germanium telluride (GeTe), which, due to its special properties, is widely used to convert waste heat into electricity or electricity into cooling.
The chamber showed that GeTe remains structured like a crystal, on average, at all temperatures.
But at higher temperatures, it exhibited more dynamic disorder, with the atoms trading motion for thermal energy, following a gradient that coincides with the direction of the material’s spontaneous electrical polarization.
A better understanding of these physical structures improves our work. Knowing how thermoelectricity works allows us to develop better materials and equipment, such as the instruments that power rovers when sunlight is not available.
With models based on the observations made by the new camera, the scientific understanding of these materials and processes can be improved. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to prepare vsPDF for a widely used testing method.
“We expect the vsPDF method described here to become a standard tool for matching local and medium structures into energetic materials,” the researchers write in the published paper.
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