Computationally mediated microscopy/microanalysis : the next frontier.

Over the last three decades, microscopists and microanalysts have successfully developed, documented and exploited a large number of experimental techniques for the characterization of the morphology, crystallography, elemental, chemical and electronic structure of their samples. While the application of any of these now ''routine'' tools of microcharacterization remains the foundation of the work reported in the microscopy or microanalysis literature, it can be safely asserted that the technologically important problems of the next decade will demand an ever increasing sophistication in how we attack and solve the ensuing generation of problems using the resources we have at hand. It is also reasonably safe to say that while improving something as basic as the resolution of an instrument will generally facilitate studying a new class of materials, it will not fundamentally change how we work, it will only change what one studies. To truly create a new paradigm of how we, as experimentalists, enlist resources to solve vexing problems; we have to step back and consider what are all the limiting factors to employing our resources to their greatest utility, then we must come up with new ways of combining these resources to change the how we might tackle new problems.