Dr Liarou, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and former EUTOPIA Science and Innovation Fellow at Warwick said,

“This multidisciplinary work brings together researchers across different fields, institutions and departments, with the aim to understand polymers at the smallest possible scale . It bridges the long-standing gap between advanced electron microscopy and polymers and presents the first approach towards the atomic-level imaging of polymers that were thus far inaccessible in the sub-nano scale.”

By strategically combining metal-rich polymers and ADF-STEM imaging, macromolecular fundamentals i.e., molecular weight and dispersity were determined with high precision. Importantly, the research shows that widely used polymers, e.g., poly(methyl acrylate), can be derivatized and imaged on the sub-nano level, thus expanding the scope of advanced electron microscopy imaging towards commodity polymers.