Making a movie of nanocrystal structural evolution

When you rapidly turn the pages of a flipbook, the series of static images look like they are moving. Scientists recently applied a similar principle to capture how the structure of a material changes over extremely short time scales—mere trillionths of a second or faster. To record this atomic-scale motion, they needed a special instrument housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.