Scientists Achieve Real-Time Atom Rearrangement Monitoring Using Advanced Microscopy

Researchers at the Sensitive Instrument Facility of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory realized real-time atom rearrangement monitoring with the help of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy during the production of intermetallic nanoparticles (iNPs).

Together with Wenyu Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University and a researcher at Ames Laboratory, they studied nanoparticles made of a platinum-tin alloy. These exclusive iNPs find applications in biofuel production and energy-efficient fuel conversion, and are the sole focus of Huang’s research team.

In the formation of these materials, there was a lot of information missing in the middle that is useful to us for optimal catalytic properties tuning.

Wenyu Huang, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Iowa State University.

Intermediate phases were identified with their own distinctive set of catalytic properties by monitoring the movement of metal atoms of tin and platinum during synthesis of iNPs using advanced microscopy at high temperature.

Conventional material synthesis focuses on the beginning and the end of a reaction, without much understanding of the pathway. Atomic-level observation of the alloying process led to the discovery of the reaction route. Once we knew intermediate states in between, we could control the reaction to ‘stop’ at that point. That opens up a new way to predict and control our discovery of new materials.

Lin Zhou, Scientist, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, Ames Laboratory.

The study is further reviewed in the paper titled “Toward Phase and Catalysis Control: Tracking the Formation of Intermetallic Nanoparticles at Atomic Scale,” published in Chem and authored by Tao Ma, Shuai Wang, Minda Chen, Raghu Maligal-Ganesh, Lin-Lin Wang, Duane D. Johnson, Matthew J. Kramer, Wenyu Huang, and Lin Zhou.

This research was partly supported by Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds through Ames Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.