Scientific progress has always gone hand in hand with the development of new methods to examine nature ever more closely. Larger and more powerful telescopes are being built in order to be able to look further into space. At the same time, microscopes are improved in the other direction in order to better understand the matter around us and also ourselves. Scanning probe methods and transmission electron microscopy, for example, have made atoms visible, where imaging takes place under largely static conditions. In this way we can explore equilibrium states in detail.
However, if we want to understand how a system changes from one state to another, we are faced with a new problem: the shutter speed. We have to do our recording so quickly that the movement is kind of frozen. The recording must therefore happen much faster than the movement to be examined. This works relatively well when photographing people by choosing a fast shutter speed on the camera. However, the smaller the processes examined, the faster they usually run. When taking a closer look spatially, an ever higher time resolution is required to be able to observe dynamic processes.
Such a time-resolved method has so far been missing on the nanometer scale and below. So far it has not been possible to make small electrical currents such as photosynthesis in plants directly visible and understandable. This project addressed this problem and aimed at implementing a new method to bring today’s best time resolution to the nanoworld.
