New FusionScope Streamlines Material Characterization
The search for the next revolutionary material starts with a combinatorial library—a grid of miniscule material samples that vary along a gradient. A library may contain hundreds or thousands of samples just one micrometer (one millionth of a meter) long, made with increasing amounts of a particular compound or synthesized at increasing temperature.
“For example, we characterize (materials) in terms of surface (traits) like roughness and mechanical, photovoltaic, or ferroelectric properties so we can estimate how capable these materials are,” said Alla Slautina, a research specialist at the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (IAMM).
Slautina is a part of the ATHENA Programmable Cloud Lab, a federally funded, interdepartmental program led by Department of Materials Science and Engineering Weston Fulton Professor Sergei Kalinin. ATHENA unites experts at the University of Tennessee, Northwestern University, and Johns Hopkins University to automate and accelerate materials characterization with automated microscopes driven by agentic (independent) AIs.
“When we characterize new materials that are synthesized, we can spend a lot of time figuring out what (evaluation) modes we should use, where we should measure something, how we proceed with further measurements and implementation,” Slautina explained. “The agent-level AI here will increase the speed of the whole characterization process.”
Thanks to Kalinin’s partnership with Quantum Design North America, the world’s foremost commercial source of automated materials characterization systems, IAMM is now the proud home of a Quantum Design FusionScope, which combines three types of microscopy to make highly detailed and correlated measurements. The top-of-the-line tool reduces training and research time while improving characterization and researcher confidence.
Kalinin and Slautina’s team will leverage the FusionScope in their own characterization work, then incorporate additional tools into the system and tie it into their developing agentic AI system.
“We are excited to collaborate with Sergei Kalinin in pushing the frontiers of correlative microscopy and look forward to the discoveries that will emerge from his research with Quantum Design’s FusionScope,” said Stefano Spagna, Quantum Design’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives. “We believe this work has the potential to redefine nanoscale characterization and manipulation, opening new possibilities for understanding and engineering materials at unprecedented scales.”
FusionScope Saves Time, Increases Accuracy
The ATHENA team uses a variety of microscope techniques to analyze the samples in a combinatorial library, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS).
Previously, if the engineers identified an interesting feature on one instrument, they would have to remove the library, prepare it for the next machine, and manually locate that feature again. Some features are less than 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter) long, making additional readings very time and labor-intensive.
The FusionScope combines SEM, AFM, and EDS, allowing ATHENA researchers to seamlessly switch between methods without disturbing the sample. They can even overlay the results to visualize multiple aspects of a sample simultaneously.
“Being able to see each domain and know the electrical behavior, the magnetic behavior, and the topological look of it all within one scan is pretty incredible,” said Faith Hines, a graduate student in Kalinin’s research group. “I’m very excited to know with a certain degree of (confidence) that the behavior that we’re looking at on SEM is the same area of the sample that we see with AFM.”
Facilitating New Discoveries
In addition to saving time and increasing correlation accuracy, the FusionScope also lets new researchers contribute to the field alongside professionals with decades of experience.
Newsha Javanmardi, another of Kalinin’s graduate students, has previously only worked with optical microscopes capable of identifying large-scale features. Thanks to the FusionScope, she can now take advanced measurements at the nanoscale without specialized training.
“Microscopy work is fantastic itself, and working on this machine makes it much more fantastic,” Javanmardi said. “The precision and the quality, the capability of this machine is amazing.”
Once Kalinin and Slautina’s team implements automation on the FusionScope, characterization and materials search at IAMM and ATHENA’s partner institutions will be even more efficient. Slautina is also excited to integrate more analytical microscopy tools into the FusionScope suite, compounding the benefit of the multi-tool.
“I’m hoping that we, together with Quantum Design, can upgrade this machine and promote the idea that correlative measurements are not something scary,” Slautina said. “I think working together with Quantum Design to add more capabilities to this machine will help not only us as researchers, but (get) the whole AFM and SEM community working together to get really great results.”Contact
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Izzie Gall ([email protected])