Berkeley Lab scientists let an AI assistant run an advanced electron microscope
Users can describe an experiment in plain English, and the assistant carries out the dozens of steps.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have connected a commercial AI model to one of the lab's most advanced microscopes, so users can run experiments by typing instructions in plain English, the lab said Oct. 29.
The work was done at the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy center at the Berkeley lab that lets visiting scientists use costly equipment. Its transmission electron microscopes use beams of electrons instead of light and can show details about half the size of a hydrogen atom. Visitors often need weeks of training to run them.
The team rewrote its existing automation programs for the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives an AI a fixed menu of approved actions instead of free rein. The assistant, called TEM Agent, can change magnification, tilt the sample and refocus the beam. At first it mixed up tilting the sample with rotating the scan, and researchers had to correct it.
"A non-expert can now do things that used to require custom code for every scenario," said Peter Ercius, the staff scientist who led a study on the work in the journal npj Computational Materials.