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Application Spotlight
See Chemistry in Action
From invisible to visible: Most chemical reactions happen in a “black box” – you mix the ingredients, wait, and hope for the best. But what if you could actually watch the reaction unfold in real time, with nanometer precision?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Many advanced materials – such as catalysts, battery components, polymers, or pharmaceuticals – owe their performance to tiny details in how they form. The very first milliseconds of a reaction often decide whether the final product is perfect, flawed, or unusable.
We want to provide you with an non-destructive and holistic in operando technique to follow your reactions
Traditional methods rarely capture these early stages. Our approach changes the game by:
- Seeing any type of matter – solid, liquid, crystalline, or amorphous
- Detecting objects smaller than 5 nanometers
- Recording changes in microseconds
- Working label-free – no dyes or markers needed
Think of our technique as a highly sensitive “shadow detector.”
When a particle, such as a sphere during formation and a few nm across, scatters light, that interacts in certain ways with other photons from the sample. This interaction allows us to determine the particle’s size and its exact position with nanometer accuracy.
These patterns are not just pretty: using clever algorithms and tools, enable the user to reconstruct the particle’s path with remarkable speed and precision.
COFs are promising materials for energy storage, catalysis, and more. For almost two decades, scientists struggled to predict their synthesis outcomes. Now it was revealed why: the solvent itself isn’t just a passive medium – it actively controls how building blocks meet and connect.
For the first time, researchers could watch:
- Pre-nucleation: Molecules and solvents rearranging within milliseconds.
- Nucleation: Tiny seed particles forming at interfaces.
- Growth: Particles connecting into ordered networks.
This insight led to a new synthesis protocol – producing high-quality COFs at room temperature instead of days of heating at 120 °C.
Further reading: Gruber et al., Nature 630, 872-877 (2024) – Early stages of covalent organic framework formation imaged in operando
While COFs were the showcase, the field of possible applications is much broader:
- Designing cleaner, faster polymerizations
- Improving pharmaceutical crystallization
- Optimizing nanoparticle production
- Monitoring battery material formation
- Studying biochemical assembly processes
Wherever complex reactions happen, we can help to
- Guide the design of better reaction environments
- Reveal hidden intermediate steps
- Identify when and why defects form
We can assist in unlocking ways to:
- Higher confidence in that very first seconds that matter during a chemical reaction
- Scale processes more reliably
- Shorten R&D cycles
- Reduce costly early stage trial-and-error
- Achieve higher product consistency