Barwick publishes article on electron microscopy in scientific journal

Brett Barwick, associate professor of physics and chair of physics and engineering, recently co-authored an article published in Nature Review Methods Primers, a scientific journal.

“Having our research published in Nature Reviews Methods Primers is certainly an honor as this journal reaches a lot of scientists,” Barwick said.

The article titled “Laser-driven ultrafast transmission electron microscopy” describes how electron microscopes, which are typically used to image things such as atoms and molecules, can be modified to not only image these objects but also capture movies of their motion.

“By putting some optical ports on the electron microscope, the electron source can be pulsed using powerful ultrashort laser pulses and the dynamics in the nanoscale object can be initiated using a second ultrashort laser pulse,” Barwick said. “When the delay between the electron pulse and dynamics initiating laser pulse is changed, different times in the motion of the nanoscale dynamics can be captured.”

By combining these images taken at different delay times, a movie that reveals very small details and captures events happening in billionths of a second can be captured.

“[This publication] shows that this research field, which the authors, among others, helped build, is being recognized as an important sub-field of electron microscopy,” Barwick said. “As more researchers learn of the capabilities of ultrafast transmission electron microscopy, the hope is that new exciting research problems can be tackled.”

An editor from Nature Review Methods Primers approached a colleague of Barwick’s to put together a group of authors to write this article on ultrafast transmission electron microscopy. He has previously collaborated with some of these authors on various papers and projects.

Barwick said this work has extended the capabilities of electron microscopy, which benefits several fields of science.

“I would hope that [readers] take away that these techniques developed really only over the last 20 years have matured enough to be useful for a variety of different research problems,” Barwick said. “Being able to image ultrafast processes at that nanoscale has the power to better our understanding of fundamental systems that physics, chemistry and biology are all based on.”