Does anybody here do materials science or physics or know much about electron microscopy? It seems to me that this is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of modern times.

 

A few points:

1) It has a much better image quality than existing electron microscopes - obviously the main improvement people look for in new microscopy techniques, but in this case it's not terribly important because:

 

2) The resolution time for high-quality images has fallen from minutes to hours down to trillionths of a second. This means resolution time is no longer in any way a bottleneck to the speed at which fields using electron microscopy can progress. Waiting for the image to 'develop' has been completely eliminated. The benefits this will bring to materials science are hard to fathom, but productivity speed-ups of that magnitude seem a very rare thing in science.

 

3) This allows scientists to not just take high-quality stills of a surface but now they can actually take high-quality real-time video of the atomic world! Mind-blowing.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/201.../02/3283534.htm

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-cold-e...-materials.html

I'm part of the refined and European 'slow electron' movement.