ASU will soon boast the newest microscope technology — the transmission electron aberration-corrected microscope — equipped with a greater lens power and accessibility to all research communities at ASU.

Because the microscope costs around $5 million, Subhash Mahajan, the director of ASU’s School of Materials, said he encouraged Ray Carpenter, a professor in the school, to write a proposal for the National Science Foundation’s Division of Materials Research for 2009.

“[Carpenter] has a lot of credibility in the field,” Mahajan said.

Carpenter is now the principal investigator for the research project, which delves into magnets, electronics and the body.

ASU’s proposal earned a $5 million grant to buy one of the new microscopes, which will arrive in around nine months, Mahajan said.

He said ASU will allow the microscope to be available to more users and that “there are very few universities that have them.”

There are approximately seven universities in the U.S. that have the first-generation microscope, but ASU will be receiving the second-generation version, Carpenter said.

He said the second generation microscope “will have significantly better imaging and spectroscopy performance.”

As ASU is a leading research university, it is important to obtain the microscope to advance projects, Carpenter said.

“We have been doing microscopy and new materials research at ASU for more than two decades,” he said.

Carpenter added that “several companies are just beginning to produce these, [because] it’s a very difficult engineering job to design them and construct them and getting them to work right.”

The microscope has a higher image resolution, he said.

“We can determine a lot of information about the chemical composition and electron bonding,” he said.

Spectroscopy, “an experimental technique used to determine the chemistry and bonding of atoms and solids,” is improved with the microscope, Carpenter said.

He said the microscope can focus the electron beam on a specimen to a very small size.

The microscope technology took about 20 years to develop, and its spectroscopy capabilities were limited then, Carpenter said.

Carpenter said one use of the microscope is to “facilitate chemical reactions on the surface of the catalyst particles.”

Fuel cells depend on the catalyst particles for proper function. The fuel cells are used to refine oil and create different types of fuel, he said.

Overall, the microscope will “help us to understand the properties of existing materials and help us to develop superior, new materials today,” Carpenter said.

Nathan Newman, the director of the LeRoy Eyring Center for Solid State Science, said the center will be home to the new microscope, which is located in the JM Cowley Center for High Resolution Electron Microscopy.

The Eyring Center has three different labs, and one is the Cowley Center. The Cowley Center’s labs are located in the Bateman Physical Sciences Center and the Barry M. Goldwater Center for Science and Engineering, he said.

“It’s a multiuse facility that has electron microscopes, which is maybe our greatest strength,” Newman said.

He said that the microscope is important to research because “it fixes all the lenses so they’re really, really good. And it corrects the aberrations — the imperfections.”

“It can get down to what’s called half an angstrom. Usually atoms are a few angstroms apart,” Newman said.

He said that with the microscope, research in magnetism, superconductivity and semiconductors could help make certain technologies faster and stronger — like computers and cell phones.

Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.