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The microscope revolution that’s sweeping through materials science

Technological advances are transforming what researchers can study at the atomic scale.
  1. Rachel Courtland

    1. Rachel Courtland is a features editor at Nature.

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David Muller seated in front of his electron microscope in his lab at Cornell University

David Muller with his team’s electron microscope. Credit: Jesse Winter for Nature

Scientists can’t study what they can’t measure — as David Muller knows only too well. An applied physicist, Muller has been grappling for years with the limitations of the best imaging tools available as he seeks to probe materials at the atomic scale.

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Nature 563, 462-464 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07448-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 21 November 2018: An earlier version of the caption for the image showing manipulation of a silicon impurity erroneously called the device a scanning tunnelling electron microscope.

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