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Updated: May 7, 2025

Synthesis of Nine-atom Deltahedral Zintl Ions of Germanium and their Functionalization with Organic Groups
Published on: February 11, 2012
From Beam Damage to Massive Reaction Amplification under the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain
Krzysztof A Konieczny1,2, Indrajit Paul1, Jose A Rodriguez1
1Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, United States.
Abstract:
Electron microscopy in its various forms is one of the most powerful imaging and structural elucidation methods in nanotechnology where sample information is generally limited by random chemical and structural damage. Here we show how a well-selected chemical probe can be used to transform indiscriminate chemical damage into clean chemical processes that can be used to characterize some aspects of the interactions between high-energy electron beams and soft organic matter. Crystals of a Dewar benzene exposed to a 300 keV electron beam facilitate a clean valence-bond isomerization radical-cation chain reaction where the number of chemical events per incident electron is amplified by a factor of up to ca. 90,000.
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