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Combination TEM-STM microscope
Sandia researcher Jianyu Huang sits in front of a combination TEM-STM microscope used to image buckyball births. On the computer screen are images of flaws occurring in nanotubes. Huang was studying flaws in nanotube durability when he had heated a 10-nanometer-diameter multiwalled carbon nanotube to approximately 2,000 degrees Celsius. What he saw was the exterior shells of giant fullerenes form from peelings within the nanotube. High-resolution 2-D images of the process taken by a CCD camera attached to the microscope showed the fullerenes reducing in diameter, linearly with time, until the structures became the size of C-60, the smallest arrangement of carbon atoms that form the soccerball shape.
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Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
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