12-01 :: January 2012
nanotimes News in Brief
from the current 25nm to a spatial resolution of 10nm.”
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thermal analysis on stiff materials like epoxies and filled composites. “This new technique lets us mea- sure temperature and frequency-dependent pro- perties of materials rapidly over a wide bandwidth,” noted William King, the College of Engineering Bliss Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois, who led the research. The technique works by flowing a current around the U-shaped arms of a self-heating atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever and interacting that current with a magnetic field. The magnetic field allows the tip-sample force to be modulated right near the tip of the AFM.
This picture schematically shows the studied tita- nium dioxide rods illuminated by X-rays of various photon energies through a capillary condenser. A high-resolution lens – not shown here – then forms an image of the objects. © HZB
Peter Guttmann, Carla Bittencourt, Stefan Rehbein, Polona Umek, Xiaoxing Ke, Gustaaf Van Tendeloo, Chris P. Ewels & Gerd Schneider: Nanoscale spectroscopy with polarized X-rays by NEXAFS-TXM , In: Nature Pho- tonics, Volume 6, No 1, January 2012, Pages 25-29, DOI:10.1038/nphoton.2011.268: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.268
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign (USA) and Anasys Instruments, Inc. have now shown that they can perform nanoscale
“Conventional nanothermal analysis has struggled with highly filled, highly crosslinked materials and sub-100 nm thin films. This new technique has allo- wed us to reliably measure and map glass transitions and melting transions on classes of materials that were previously very challenging,” said Craig Prater,
“We are able to achieve nanometer-scale force control that is independent from the heating tempe- rature,” according to Byeonghee Lee, first author of the paper.