Scientists Have Discovered a New Way to Look Inside Crystals
09 June 2024
By TOM HAWKING
Binary crystals studied by the team. (Zang et al., Nature Materials, 2024)
A new technique that produces 3D models of individual crystals has opened a window for scientists to see the subtle deviations that emerge in their otherwise perfect patterns.
Researchers from New York University (NYU) went back to the drawing board on how to look deep inside solids made of repeating units, and determine how they grow.
With a short wavelength roughly the same size as many of the repeating units that make up crystals, X-rays have long allowed scientists to infer how a crystal's components fit together by measuring the angle at which the rays are diffracted.
For all its ingenuity, though, X-ray crystallography has its limits, which are summed up rather neatly by the opening sentence of a new paper published in Nature Materials this month: "Structures of molecular crystals are identified using scattering techniques because we cannot see inside them."
The paper describes a new technique that promises to finally change that fact – albeit not for crystals composed of repeating units of individual atoms.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-discovered-a-new-way-to-look-inside-crystals