STROBE Awards

The editors of Microscopy Today congratulate the winners of the tenth Microscopy Today Innovation Award competition. The ten innovations advance microscopy in several areas: light microscopy, electron microscopy, and scanning probe microscopy. These innovations will make microscopy and microanalysis more powerful, more productive, and easier to accomplish.Secondary Electron Electron-BeamInduced-Current (SEEBIC) Imaging University of California at Los Angeles Developers: Chris Regan and William Hubbard. While intimately related to prior electron-beaminduced-current (EBIC) methods in the SEM, secondary electron electron-beaminduced-current (SEEBIC) imaging is qualitatively and quantitatively different. What makes the SEEBIC system new is that both the secondary electron (SE) and hole signals are detected in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). SEEBIC differs from traditional EBIC in several ways. The measuring circuits are wired differently. In the former case the end of the device remote from the transimpedance amplifier is extremely high impedance, while in the latter it is tied to a low impedance (usually ground) to allow charge neutralization. While traditional EBIC imaging is sensitive to holes, it only generates contrast in regions where the sample supports an electric field that will separate electron-hole pairs. In most samples such regions are special and localized, for example, in a p-n junction. Thus, most of the sample generates no contrast when imaged with traditional EBIC. SEEBIC, on the other hand, is an inevitable consequence of imaging a thin specimen with an energetic electron beam, and SEEBIC imaging generates contrast everywhere in a sample. SEEBIC imaging has not been demonstrated previously for a couple reasons. First, the typical SEM sample is electron-opaque, and primary beam absorption produces a large background; thus, the SEEBIC signal is buried in the noise of the traditional SEM EBIC apparatus. This background is largely absent in the electron-transparent samples used in STEM. Secondly, the secondary electron (SE) yield drops with increasing beam energy; therefore, the SE signal is even smaller in a 200 kV STEM than in a 30 kV SEM. Detection of the signal requires a current measuring system that is low-noise and protected from electromagnetic interference (1 pA EBIC corresponds to ∼6,000 electrons in a 1 ms dwell time). SEEBIC is sensitive to electric potential, electric field, work function, conductivity, and temperature, and it can probe these quantities with atomic resolution in a modern STEM. STEM SEEBIC can image a functioning resistive random access memory (RRAM). For example, in a HfO2-based RRAM, the conducting filament is thought to consist of oxygen vacancies. Oxygen vacancies are basically invisible in a standard STEM image, but they give excellent contrast when viewed with STEM EBIC imaging.

On Thursday, September 26, Workforce Development & Education hosted our annual Mentor Appreciation event where we recognized our outstanding mentors and STEM partners. This event highlighted accomplishments for FY2018. Outstanding 2018 STEM Partner is hereby awarded on this 26th day of September 2019, to Jessie Woodcock, in recognition of partnership and support of Workforce Development & Education programs.

Thank you to the SRC students, industry, and faculty that attended TECHCON and made it a great success. The final event for TECHCON 2019 was presenting Top 10 Student Presentation Awards and the URI Best Poster Awards at Tuesday’s Dinner.

2019 TECHCON Student Presentation Award Winner:

Joshua Knobloch
Nanoscale Metrology and Imaging of Layered and Nano-enhanced Materials using Coherent Extreme Ultraviolet Beams

The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 100 new members and 25 foreign associates in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Forty percent of the newly elected members are women—the most ever elected in any one year to date. Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,347 and the total number of foreign associates to 487. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in the teaching of undergraduates. OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. The GSI Teaching & Resource Center provides the award recipients certificates of distinction and hosts a celebratory ceremony in the spring.

Each year, SPIE promotes Members as new Fellows of the Society. SPIE will honor 88 new Fellows of the Society this year. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement and for their service to the general optics community and to SPIE in particular. More than 1,400 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society’s inception in 1955. Dr. Jessica Ramella-Roman, Florida International University, United States was elected for achievements in spectro-polarimetric techniques for diagnostic applications.

Jenna Tan received an NDSEG Fellowship to increase the number of U.S. citizens trained in science and engineering disciplines of military importance and the Department of Defense.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

Spot Award Purpose: The purpose of the Spot Recognition Award program is to acknowledge and reward outstanding individual and/or team workplace contributions that occur on a day-to-day basis. (For safety-related recognition, please see the Safety Spot Award Program Guidelines). Contributions should impact the quality, cost, service, safety, or resource utilization of an organizational unit, team, or department.