Living in a material world Imagine the situation: you're a chemist, trying hard every day to make a new material. Maybe you add something different to your reaction ingredients, or maybe you just heat them for a bit longer, or to a higher temperature than normal. How do you know whether you've succeeded, and made something never seen before?
Your reaction product might end up a different colour, or be a bit smellier, but it also might not. People are known for getting salt and sugar confused in their own kitchens, so you can't rely on your eyes alone. There are many different methods that chemists use to characterise a material, finding out whether it could be the next big thing.
Taking a closer look First you might start off by using a more powerful set of eyes: the field of microscopy extends far beyond the optical microscopes you could use to look at leaves or bugs on a glass slide. Using an optical microscope, you are limited by the wavelength of the photon of light that you are using to see your material.
An electron has a wavelength of up to 100,000 shorter than that of a visible light photon, and so if you use electrons you can see even smaller, revealing changes in material you hadn't been able to see before. High resolution images produced in this way have been used in graphene research to check to see if there are defects in the graphene layer.