Polarization charges in ferroelectric materials are screened by equal amounts of surface charges with opposite polarity under ambient conditions. Researchers from the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne’s Nanoscience & Technology and Materials Science divisions (Argonne, Ill.), and Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan), have shown that scraping, collecting, and quantifying surface screen charges reveals the underlying polarization domain structure at high speed, a technique dubbed charge gradient microscopy (CGM).

Digital Surf (Besançon,France), a leading provider of surface imaging and metrology software for microscopes and profilers, and Image Metrology (Hørsholm,Denmark), a leading provider of nano- and microscale image processing software, announced that they are joining forces. Digital Surf acquired 100% interest in Image Metrology. Both companies will continue to operate independently under their existing management.

A novel combination of microscopy and data processing has given researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., an unprecedented look at the surface of a material known for its unusual physical and electrochemical properties. The team examined how oxygen affects the surface of a perovskite manganite, a complex material that exhibits dramatic magnetic and electronic behavior.