Hunting for isotopes with EELS

A picture of the setup used to carry out the experiments

Source: © Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Electron microscopy detects isotopically labelled molecules with nanoscale resolution 

Researchers in the US have used an electron microscope to directly detect isotopes at specific sites in molecules of alanine. The technique could potentially be used to study chemical mechanisms with nanoscale resolution.