The Nano Structure of Enamel

Conference Name: 22nd International Conference on Advanced Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Short Name: Nanoscience 2019

Venue: Prague, Czech Republic| May 16-17, 2019

URL: https://goo.gl/d8MtzV

The Nano Structure of Enamel

                   Cavities are on the rise. If you’re an adult you’ve probably got one now. The World Health Organization says nearly 100 percent of adults suffer from them. And some 60 to 90 percent of children have them, too.

Yes, we can blame it on the soda, the candy, the chocolate-chip scones, and what have you. But to really get in there and fix the problem, we have to know how and why these things penetrate enamel. And to understand that, you have to understand enamel.

Julie Carney, a professor of material and structures engineering at Australia’s University of Sydney, has managed to take a good look at the hard shiny stuff at the atomic level using a new microscopy technique. Atom probe tomography, as it’s known, “allows us to reconstruct exact positions of atoms within matter,” says Carney.

The process is somewhat painstaking. First, a piece of enamel is harvested and, using an ion beam, molded into the shape of a needle. Then a field is applied to the hemispherical tip and atoms are plucked off one by one, over a period of five to six hours. Knowing the time of flight and the angle at which it flew, Cairney and her team can back-calculate to determine the initial position of the atoms. “We use algorithms to see which atoms are sitting where, but it’s real data from a real sample,”

After experimenting on her child, Cairney may turn to examining areas of decay. Such an investigation may be a bit trickier, however. Atom probe tomography works best on very dense stuff and a piece of decayed tooth may be a bit too holey on the atomic scale as well as the macro.