Small Crystals, Big Insights: How Electron Diffraction is Transforming Materials, Life Science, and Chemistry Research

In this session, we will review how electron diffraction is reshaping research in fields such as pharmaceuticals, metal-organic frameworks, synthetic chemistry and materials science by solving crystal structures that were previously unsolvable, screen hundreds of crystallization conditions and automate polymorphs and impurities identification and quantification over thousands of tiny crystals.

In this session, you will learn about the use cases of electron diffraction, success stories, challenges, and how they were overcome. Starting from the physical foundations and history of the technique, we will develop an outlook on what the future will bring to further push the boundaries of analytical insights unlocked by electron diffraction.

In this session, we will walk through the complete electron diffraction process, including sample preparation, data collection, and structural analysis. We will explore how integrated hardware and software in a dedicated diffractometer streamline workflows, enhancing the efficiency of single-crystal structural solutions and making bulk powder analysis by ED a practical approach.

In this session, the application of MicroED to characterize samples that may be sub-milligram in weight, be impure and imperfect from a crystalline perspective, and exhibit nanometer sized particles will be discussed along with examples of measurements on nanoparticle delivery systems.

In this session, we demonstrate the use of micro-ED to study the structural evolution of sodium-ion battery cathode materials for next-generation inexpensive batteries. During charge and discharge, sodium-ion cathodes undergo numerous phase transitions to accommodate sodium ions being removed and added. This crystal structure evolution controls the voltage, usable capacity, and long-term stability of the battery. Subtle superstructures driven by sodium-vacancy ordering and Jahn-Teller effects are especially important, but very difficult to detect with powder X-ray diffraction. We demonstrate the utility of electron micro-ED to determine these structures. Single crystal electron diffraction patterns are collected on individual particles of battery-grade cathode materials, and used to solve sodium-vacancy orderings that were previously unsolved, helping to better understand the performance bottlenecks of sodium-ion battery cathodes.