Nowadays, more and more smart phones or high-end telescopes are equipped with high-resolution cameras that can magnify and even let you see the appearance of the moon, but these are not compatible with Hitachi scanning electron microscope pixel array detectors.

The professional electron microscope manufacturer team produced this high-performance microscope EMPAD and combined with the ptychography algorithm, which directly increased the resolution of the electron microscope by 3 times and won the Guinness International Record, which can measure up to 0.039 nanometers. Sol Gruner, one of the researchers at the time, joked that he always thought he would have to eat 40 burgers within 5 minutes, or stand on one foot for a few days before entering the Guinness International Record. Several atoms got admission tickets.

Now, combined with a more complex 3D reconstruction algorithm and scanning PrScO3 (praseodymium orthoscandate) crystals, the international record of electron microscope resolution has been doubled, and the accuracy is so high that the chemical bonds in individual atoms and molecules can be seen, causing ambiguity. Only the atomic lattice itself oscillates thermally.

In the past, any experiment that tried to image a single atom produced ambiguity images, like looking at the world with a pair of incompatible glasses, but now the team’s technology is accurate enough to locate a single atom in three dimensions. Detect impurities in the sample and image them and their oscillations. For the industry, this is particularly useful when evaluating the quality of semiconductors, catalysts, and sensitive quantum data used in quantum computers.

In addition, the Hitachi scanning electron microscope team could only image extremely thin data samples that are only a few atoms thick, but the new technology can image thicker data samples (although it will still be a loss if it is thicker, because electrons are scattered in an unsolvable way. ), in addition to helping atomic imaging at the gap between semiconductors and catalysts, it can also improve today's medical imaging, making clearer and thicker biological arrangements, brain synaptic connections, and so on.

Although the process of obtaining such high-precision images is still reasonably time-consuming, more powerful supercomputers can be used in conjunction with new calculation methods to increase power.