Wow very nice ...:-) RESEARCHERS: ELECTRON BEAMS COULD FUNCTION AS NANO-SCALE ‘TWEEZERS’

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/researchers-electron-beams-could-function-as-nano-scale-tweezers/

RESEARCHERS: ELECTRON BEAMS COULD FUNCTION AS NANO-SCALE ‘TWEEZERS’

 Wow very nice ...:-)

  

If you just consider the physics, says NIST metallurgist Oleshko, you might expect that a beam of focused electrons—such as that created by a transmission electron microscope (TEM) — could do the same thing. However that’s never been seen, in part because electrons are much fussier to work with. They can’t penetrate far through air, for example, so electron microscopes use vacuum chambers to hold specimens.

So Oleshko and his colleague, UVA materials scientist James Howe, were surprised when, in the course of another experiment, they found themselves watching an electron tweezer at work. They were using an electron microscope to study, in detail, what happens when a metal alloy melts or freezes. They were observing a small particle—a few hundred nanometers wide—of an aluminum-silicon alloy held just at a transition point where it was partially molten, a liquid shell surrounding a core of still solid metal. In such a small sample, the electron beam can excite plasmons, a kind of quantized wave in the alloy’s electrons, that reveals a lot about what happens at the liquid-solid boundary of a crystallizing metal. “Scientifically, it’s interesting to see how the electrons behave,” says Howe, “but from a technological point of view, you can make better metals if you understand, in detail, how they go from liquid to solid.”

Even with hopes for this to work in manipulation of other small objects, Oleshko says using the electron beam will still be challenge as it requires work to be done in a vacuum.