![]() ![]() He is a senior engineer in the APT laboratory at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The machine can provide a three-dimensional representation of what a material looks like, right down to the atomic level, explains Constantinos Hatzoglou. Hunnestad and colleagues present the results of many, many hours of work using “atom probe tomography” (APT) in a recent article in Nature Communications.ĪPT is an advanced piece of cutting-edge equipment that NTNU acquired a few years ago. Advanced imaging techniques make it possible For that we need to know exactly what role each individual atom plays,” says Meier. “Often, we want to introduce new functionality to materials. This is also key for developing future materials for sustainable technology. Or you can assign new properties to a material that you already have available with much greater precision. This way, for example, you can make more efficient, environmentally friendly, or cheaper materials for the job to be done. He is a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at NTNU, who led the project. “Only when you know more about how something works, can you manipulate the material and optimize it,” says Dennis Meier. So what? Why on earth should we care about single atoms and why something works? Isn’t it good enough just to know that it does work? If this was the case, physicists and chemists would certainly have fun doing the research, but the rest of us wouldn’t benefit much from it. This gives us new insight and allows us to understand how they affect that material’s properties,” says Hunnestad. “Now, we know much better how we can image the individual added atoms, which previously used to be almost impossible to find. This is especially true at the atomic level. But beyond the fact that it works, we haven’t always understood very much of why it does. “In the past, we doped semiconductors and saw that this drastically changed the electrical properties of the material,” says PhD candidate Kasper Aas Hunnestad at NTNU’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. This improves the semiconductor’s performance so they’re not so bad after all. But you can add tiny amounts of other substances to them, a process known as doping. These are materials that are not very good at conducting electricity. Today, all microelectronics depend on semiconductors. Your digital gadgets, for example, are completely dependent on it. Although nanotechnology and materials science are complicated topics for most of us, the research in these fields is of great importance to almost everyone. ![]()
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