Detection of sub-atomic movement in nanostructures Nanoscale Advances(2021) 

Nanoscale objects move fast and oscillate billions of times per second. Such movements occur naturally in the form of thermal (Brownian) motion while stimulated movements underpin the functionality of nano-mechanical sensors and active nano-(electro/opto) mechanical devices. Here we introduce a methodology for detecting such movements, based on the spectral analysis of secondary electron emission from moving nanostructures, that is sensitive to displace- ments of sub-atomic amplitude. We demonstrate the detection of nanowire Brownian oscillations of ~10 pm amplitude and hyper- spectral mapping of stimulated oscillations of setae on the body of a common flea. The technique opens a range of opportunities for the study of dynamic processes in materials science, nanotechnology and biology.

Detection of sub-atomic movement in nanostructures
T. Liu, J. Y. Ou*, K. F. MacDonald, and N. I. Zheludev
Nanoscale Advances (2021) doi: 10.1039/d0na01068e – pdf

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s