3D Chemical Imaging at the Nanoscale

Summary:

3D chemical imaging techniques will provide a quantitative understanding of the distribution of chemical species in three dimensions including the internal structure, interfaces, and surfaces of micro and nanoscale systems.  

These techniques are critical to the development of successful commercial products in nanotechnology.  NIST is pursuing new approaches that will be broadly applicable to nanoscale technologies from microelectronics to pharmaceuticals and subcellular biomedical applications.

Immersive visualization will expose three dimensional structures at the nano-scale and will enable researchers to understand the relationships of the components within nanodevices.

Additional Technical Details:

We have developed some initial immersive visualizations based on open source software, DIVERSE and openDX, as well as additional software created in-house. We are developing additional immersive visualization tools for 3D representation of the reconstructed data sets to show internal structure of the samples.  

We have also implemented several geometric algorithms for use with the Bayesian reconstruction software.  These algorithms involve both ray-to-voxel and voxel-to-ray intersection calculations.