When young, we’re always curious about many things.

Prof. Yao Yang still recalls seeing an atomic model in a high school textbook, a structure composed of “one ball on another,” which left a deep impression.

At that time, he thought: How cool would it be to be able to see the internal structure of matter one day!

As an undergraduate, Yang began to investigate two-dimensional materials at Tsinghua University. During his doctoral and postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he gradually focused his research on understanding the real structure of various materials at the microscopic scale.

Yang joined the Westlake University School of Engineering this year as a full-time principal investigator to do research in electron microscopy, continuing his journey of curiosity, discovery, and truth.

Glass, a common material in our lives, has never been truly understood since its discovery thousands of years ago. 1960 saw the invention of metallic glass, an amorphous material made up of atoms stacked together. For more than sixty years, scientists have been trying to uncover the mystery of amorphous substances by exploring the metallic glass system.

Unlike the structure of crystalline substances, the atomic arrangement of amorphous materials is disordered. That means people cannot directly determine the exact positions of their atoms bycrystallography, and can only guess at the structure of glass. This makes ordinary microscopes somewhat useless in the face of amorphous substances represented by glass.

In 2021, the three-dimensional atomic resolution electron tomography (AET) developed by Yang and his colleagues realized a 60-year-old dream. Using high-resolution tomography and a specific 3D reconstruction algorithm, they succeeded in experimentally determining the exact positions of more than 18,000 atoms in metallic glass with a 3D accuracy of up to 21 trillionths of a meter.

The related study, titled "Determining the Three-dimensional Atomic Structure of an Amorphous Solid" was published in Nature.

The team observed the structural characteristics of the material at the atomic level. Their research revealed the 3D positions of all atoms in metallic glass for the first time, and provided direct experimental evidence to support the overall framework of the efficient cluster packing model of metallic glass.

In the future, Yang hopes to focus on the three-dimensional atomic reconstruction of functional materials such as nano-catalyst materials and quantum materials, as well as the multi-dimensional dynamic process of materials in different reactions at atomic resolution.

In addition, Yang also wants to devote himself to the development of new electronic imaging methods, and looks forward to working with more scientists at Westlake to explore promising materials such as high-entropy alloys and perovskites.

Yang has never forgotten what he wanted to do most when he first started his scientific journey. "In the beginning, my goal was always to explore amorphous materials."

This is no easy task as it can take five or 10 years, perhaps even longer, to complete such research.

But Yang, intrepid and resolute, is  continueing on that road of discovery.