{"id":18954,"date":"2023-06-13T10:31:36","date_gmt":"2023-06-13T14:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=18954"},"modified":"2023-06-13T11:40:30","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T15:40:30","slug":"tech-tools-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/06\/tech-tools-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018The Most Expensive Saw on the Planet\u2019<\/h2>\n

Nestled in the newly renovated Materials Characterization and Processing facility<\/a> in the Johns Hopkins Stieff Silver Building<\/a> is \u201cthe most expensive saw on the planet,\u201d says the facility\u2019s director and professor of materials science and engineering<\/a>, Mitra Taheri<\/a>. \u201cIt can shoot gallium ions to slice and dice and cut materials down to the nanometer,\u201d the metric unit of length equal to one billionth of a meter.<\/p>\n

Used to make something on the nano scale, like a computer chip or microelectromechanical system, a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope (or FIB-SEM) can cut a human hair\u2014approximately 50 micrometers wide\u2014lengthwise into 10 to 20 slices. It can also drill a hole that is only a few nanometers in diameter.<\/p>\n

Researchers at the MCP facility use the Helios G4 UC DualBeam FIB-SEM, made by Thermo Fisher Scientific, to fabricate nano devices and make thin slices of materials. They then take these slices and place them in the facility\u2019s transmission electron microscopes, which can resolve individual atoms.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a lot of training to make these slices,\u201d says Kenneth Livi<\/a>, MCP\u2019s director of operations and associate research scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering<\/a>, \u201cbut the effort is worth it to discover the inner workings of things.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018The Most Expensive Saw on the Planet\u2019 Nestled in the newly renovated Materials Characterization and Processing facility in the Johns Hopkins Stieff Silver Building is \u201cthe most expensive saw on the planet,\u201d says the facility\u2019s director and professor of materials science and engineering, Mitra Taheri. \u201cIt can shoot gallium ions to slice and dice and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":18958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-impact","issue-spring-2023"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTech Tools - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read about "the most expensive saw on the planet", a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/06\/tech-tools-3\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tech Tools - 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