Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is a powerful three-dimensional technique for studying structures and physical properties of microscopic surfaces including drugs and proteins down to the atomic scale.
Phil Williams of the University of Nottingham realised that as good as SPM
is, the images can be fuzzy because of distortion of the microscope tip.
He and his colleagues have designed software that works out how far from
perfect the tip is and compensates for this in producing the image. The
whole system is now run on a web server so that scientists around the world
can access the site and obtain much clearer images from their data.
Scanning probe microscopes are based around a piezoelectric crystal, which
moves a tiny atom-sized tip that, not surprisingly, "scans" a surface. The
tip bobs along the electron cloud of the surface and the signal it passes
back to the microscope is interpreted as a three-dimensional map of the
material's surface to atomic resolution.
Williams' data analysis system is a deceptively simple extension of this
interpretation process. All the user has to do is up-load their microscope
image data in raw format to the Web site. Williams' designer software
analyses image distortion and resolves it using non-linear equations. The
site has been used hundreds of times in the year or so since it was set-up
and the team have obtained useful feedback to help them fine-tune the
software for their own purposes in return.
The next process in line for the online treatment is X-ray photoelectron
peak-fitting software and maximum entropy software for enhancing NMR
spectra.
Back to the
Elemental Discoveries Feb 98 index page
This item originally appeared in the February 1998 issue of
Elemental Discoveries, David Bradley Science
Writer's science webzine.
Read more
scientific discoveries news,
medical
news headlines, and
chemistry articles
Back to the sciencebase
homepage