ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Electron crystallography

Okay, imagine you have a piece of cake that you really want to know what it's made of. So, you use a really cool machine called an electron microscope to look at it. An electron microscope is like having super special glasses that let you see really, really tiny things that you can't see with your normal eyes.

Now, when we look at the cake with the electron microscope, we actually bomb it with tiny particles called electrons. These electrons bounce off the cake and create a pattern that is called an electron diffraction pattern. This pattern will tell us what the cake is made of, kind of like a fingerprint.

So, electron crystallography is when we use the electron diffraction pattern to figure out how the atoms in the cake are arranged. Atoms are the teeny, tiny building blocks that make up everything we see around us, including our cake. By understanding how the atoms are arranged, we can learn a lot about the cake, especially its structure and composition.

Overall, electron crystallography is a really helpful tool that scientists use to understand the structure of tiny things like atoms, and it can help us learn about all sorts of materials, from cakes to metals and even medicine!