Inside a gold nanoparticle

Jianwei Miao and colleagues have developed an electron tomography method to image the 3-D structure of a gold nanoparticle at a resolution of 2.4 angstroms. Individual atoms are observed in some regions of the particle and several grains are identified in three dimensions.


In the figure, the four three-dimensional grains (green and gold; blue and red) form two pairs of twin boundaries inside the nanoparticle.


(Credit: Jianwei Miao/UCLA Physics & Astronomy, CNSI)