A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley,  Argonne National Laboratory, aBeam Technologies Inc, and University of Science and Technology of China has developed a new ultra-high resolution scanning transmission soft x-ray microscope that successfully integrated our X-ray environmental holders (liquid & gas heating) to perform spectroscopy and chemical analysis of heterogeneous nanoparticles.

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To validate the capability, an operando spectromicroscopy of a collection of lithium iron phosphate battery nanoplatelets are heated in the environmental cell and chemical distribution is mapped. The particles show a two-phase chemical transformation when heated at 300ºC including an intermediate state of charge. The details of the work have been published in the prestigious journal, Science Advances.

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Reference:

Shapiro, David A., Sergey Babin, Richard S. Celestre, Weilun Chao, Raymond P. Conley, Peter Denes, Bjoern Enders et al. “An ultrahigh-resolution soft x-ray microscope for quantitative analysis of chemically heterogeneous nanomaterials.” Science Advances  (2020).