A process called nucleation plays a critical role in many physical and biological phenomena that range from crystallization, melting and evaporation to the formation of clouds and the initiation of neurodegenerative diseases. However, nucleation is a challenging process to study experimentally, especially in its early stages, when several atoms or molecules start to form a new phase from a parent phase. Now, a team of physicists led by the University of California, Los Angeles has used a method called atomic electron tomography to study early-stage nucleation in four dimensions (that is, in three dimensions of space and across time) at atomic resolution.
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