Investigating the dynamics of nanoparticle formation from a precursor at atomic resolution

A key to materials synthesis is the ability to control the process of reduction kinetics and nucleation (phase transition) in materials. Understanding the reduction dynamics during the initial stage of material synthesis is limited due to the difficulty of investigating chemical reactions at the atomic scale. This is mainly because the chemical precursors used to synthesize materials can degrade when exposed to electron beams that are typically used to image compounds at atomic resolution.