A New Way to Grow Tiny Crystal Triangles

People have been working on making barium tungstate crystals. They used a special method called high-temperature oxygen-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. This is a fancy way of growing crystals by shooting tiny particles at a hot surface. The surface in this case was made of tungsten, a metal that's really good at conducting heat and electricity. The crystals that formed were not just any shape. They were isosceles triangles, like the ones you might draw in geometry class. But these were tiny, really tiny. Each triangle was about the size of a speck of dust but only as thick as a few layers of atoms.To watch the crystals grow, scientists used a special microscope that shoots electrons instead of light. This microscope could show them what was happening in real time. They also used other tools to figure out what the crystals were made of and how they were arranged. Some of these tools were used right after the crystals were made, while others were used later, after the crystals had cooled down. One interesting thing they found was that the crystals were made of barium, tungsten, and oxygen. The tungsten came from the surface they were growing the crystals on. This means that the crystals were not just made of the materials they started with, but also from the surface they were growing on. The crystals also had a specific orientation. This means that they were not just lying flat on the surface, but were arranged in a particular way. The sides of the triangles were aligned along certain directions in the crystal structure.