What is Nanoanalysis?
Nanoanalysis is a fancy-sounding word that just means looking at something at the nanometer scale. You might call looking out a window “macroanalysis,” because it involves the analysis of a scene at the macro-scale. Nanoanalysis is conducted using any number of technologies that can resolve images at the nanoscale — scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs), atomic force microscopes (AFMs), scanning probe microscopes (SPMs), transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), field emission microscopes (FEMs), and for the highest resolution, x-ray crystallography. Nanoanalysis really took off with the invention of x-ray crystallography in 1914. The first chemical whose atomic structure was imaged was table salt, NaCl. X-ray crystallography does not produce an exact image of the object under nanoanalysis — instead, it reflects x-rays (which have tiny wavelengths) off a crystal and a diffraction pattern is recorded, similar to what is seen when someone holds up a crystal to light and observes how the
