For years, scientists have had an itch they couldn’t scratch. Even with the best microscopes and spectrometers, it’s been difficult to study and identify molecules at the so-called mesoscale, a region of matter that ranges from 10 to 1000 nanometers in size. Now, with the help of broadband infrared light from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), researchers have developed a broadband imaging technique that looks inside this realm with unprecedented sensitivity and range. By combining atomic force microscopy with infrared synchrotron light, researchers from Berkeley Lab and the University of Colorado have improved the spatial resolution of infrared spectroscopy by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously covering its full spectroscopic range, enabling the investigation of variety of nanoscale, mesoscale, and surface phenomena that were previously difficult to study. The new technique, called Synchrotron Infrared Nano-Spectroscopy or SINS, will enable in-depth study of complex molecular systems, including liquid batteries, living cells, novel electronic materials and stardust. “The big thing is that we’re getting full broadband infrared spectroscopy at 100 to 1000 times smaller scale,” says Hans Bechtel, principal scientific engineering associate at Berkeley Lab. “This is not an incremental
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