High-pressure research could lead to new nanomaterials

They did this by developing a way to get around the severe distortions of high-energy X-ray beams that are used to image the structure of a gold nanocrystal, a development claimed to be a first.

The technique, described in Nature Communications, could lead to advancements of new nanomaterials created under high pressures and a greater understanding of what is happening in planetary interiors.

Lead author of the study, Wenge Yang of the Illinois-based Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Consortium (HPSync) said, ‘The only way to see what happens to such samples when under pressure is to use high-energy X-rays produced by synchrotron sources.

‘Synchrotrons can provide highly coherent X-rays for advanced 3D imaging with tens of nanometres of resolution. This is different from incoherent X-ray imaging used for medical examination that has micron spatial resolution. The high pressures fundamentally change many properties of the material.’

The team found that by averaging the patterns of the bent waves - the diffraction patterns - of the same crystal using different sample alignments in the instrumentation, and by using an algorithm developed by researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, they can compensate for the distortion and improve spatial resolution by two orders of magnitude.