ASU is pushing the barriers of science and technology with the addition of new electron microscopes to the Tempe campus.
The high-powered microscopes, which can be used in fields from archeology to engineering, will be housed in a new extension of the John W. Schwada Building.
The microscopes can capture images at the atomic level, showing both the chemistry and the positions of the atoms in a sample, said Ray Carpenter, an electron microscopy professor at ASU.
This presents the building blocks of life’s existence in very high quality images, he said.
The first microscope is expected to be running by April or May, Carpenter said. The second one will be installed in the second half of 2011, with two more expected in the next two to three years, he added.
Electron microscopy is a delicate branch of imaging that requires the microscopes be in very stable conditions for the duration of the scanning.
The new facility, which is in its final stages of construction, is specifically made to house and keep the microscopes stable and secure. The Schwada extension is part of the LeRoy Eyring Center for Solid State Sciences, which provides researchers and students with research technology, such as the electron microscopes.
“With this kind of a microscope, you have to consider the site of the microscope as a system, because you can have electrical instabilities in the microscope,” Carpenter said. “You can have all these other instabilities at the site, and they all affect image quality.”
Some of these instabilities include the vibrations from sound, fluctuations in the temperature and physical vibrations, such as footsteps. A change in any one of those would negatively affect the outcome of the images created by the microscopes, Carpenter said.
To prevent such occurrences, the building is equipped with one room per microscope and a separate control room for each microscope. Each room is soundproof, with radiant cooling panels to keep the temperature constant and LED lights that generate very little heat, Carpenter said.
The microscopes are opening the doors to the future for students at ASU, who can use them to do many types of research, said Nathan Newman, director of the LeRoy Eyring Center for Solid State Sciences.
“We have a lab that can be used by the entire ASU research community and teaching community,” Newman said. “We even have high school students who come in and use some of the advanced instruments.”
The microscopes provide digital readouts of the images, which will give teachers the ability to show the images to their classes in real time.
“We have the most advanced instruments in the country,” Newman said. “The unique features that are coming in with our microscopes puts us at the top.”
Reach the reporter at jlago@asu.edu
