By studying how materials build themselves and by mimicking those processes, it is possible to create materials with new structures and properties. This is what Wallenberg Scholar Kimberly Dick Thelander, professor of materials science at Lund University, is doing.
At the nano scale, which is measured in billionths of a meter, phenomena occur that do not otherwise exist. Thelander and her colleagues are studying this process while it actually takes place. This is possible thanks to an electron microscope she has been using and developing since 2016.
“Everything we wanted to do when it was new is now possible. We use the microscope every day, and it is involved in about 70 percent of our research,” she says.
The studies of existing materials are the first step on the way to designing completely new structures with new properties.
The basic material is usually a gas that spontaneously forms crystals inside a large machine. The machine contains the electron microscope, enabling the researchers to record images and film at atomic scale.
“We’re trying to understand the materials and their crystalline structures at atomic level. When we identify the processes that determine the structures and control those processes, we will also be able to control the properties.”
