Liquid-Phase TEM Imaging of NP Self-Assembly and Protein Fluctuation

We will present our group’s recent progresses on establishing and utilizing electron microscopy to image, understand, and manipulate colloidal and biological systems, in space and time at a nanometer resolution. This involves systems that underpin the fundamentals of structure-functional relationship for a wide range of phenomena and applications. In this talk, we will discuss in detail three types of such systems, including metallic nanoparticles assembling into Moire superlattices as promising optical and mechanical metamaterials, membrane protein lipid assemblies’ structure fluctuations and fingering dynamics, and electrochemical energy materials’ strain propagation with nano-sizing effects. We will show how we build upon liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy and four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, and couple them with machine learning and molecular dynamics simulations. This coupling enables us to study the dynamic, squishy, multifunctional soft and biological systems in liquid and at operation, and to study the charge-lattice interactions in an ordered materials’ phase transformation.