STROBE in the News

The Franklin Institute is pleased to announce The Franklin Institute Awards Class of 2020! Henry C. Kapteyn and Margaret M. Murnane, 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics. Now in its 196th year, The Franklin Institute Awards pays tribute to our namesake and America’s first great scientist, Benjamin Franklin, by honoring the greatest minds in science, engineering, and industry. Our newest laureates are making our world safer, healthier, and more connected. They made revolutionary advances in laser technology, learned how forests recover from fires, uncovered the mechanisms behind color vision, and laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. Their work enables technologies never before thought possible and helps us better understand our planet and ourselves. They are mentors and role models for the next generation of science and engineering trailblazers. They are creating a better future for us all.

A husband-and-wife team at the forefront of laser science at the University of Colorado Boulder has followed in the footsteps of the Curies, winning a prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medal. The Franklin Institute announced today that Henry Kapteyn and Margaret Murnane would receive this year’s medal in physics—one of several awards handed out annually by the center named after the scientist and founding father.

Robert Karl earned his PhD in physics in December. Since 2014, he has been working on nanoimaging in the CU Boulder lab of professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn. When not in the lab, he works on jokes and performs in weekly comedy shows on campus.

The 2019 class of Women Who Make a Difference impact our community by serving as teachers, mentors, mothers and advocates. They write, they blog, they include and make countless other contributions big and small.

Berkeley Physics congratulates physics major Namrata Ramesh on being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Namrata is in her senior year, pursuing a Physics (Honors) degree. Her senior thesis, supervised by Professor Naomi Ginsberg, involves understanding the dynamics of self-assembly of gold nanocrystal superlattices using optical and x-ray scattering techniques. She has also worked on studying the trajectories of electrons in manganese doped halide perovskites using Monte Carlo simulations. At Oxford, she hopes to continue investigating the origins of intriguing phenomena in promising photovoltaic materials by being at the interface of experimental and computational physics. Namrata is also very passionate about diversity in STEM fields and multimedia storytelling and has combined both interests by starting “The STEMinist Chronicles”, an organization that currently uses photo essays to tell the stories of women in STEM.

Researchers use electron microscopy to produce high-resolution images at the atomic scale of everything from composite nanomaterials to single proteins. The technology provides invaluable information on the texture, chemistry, and structure of these materials. Research over the past few decades has focused on achieving higher resolutions: being able to image materials at progressively finer levels with more sensitivity and contrast. But what does the future hold for electron microscopy?

Winners of the R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World magazine and its new parent company, WTWH Media, LLC. “This awards program is so well recognized across the R&D community. Being named as one of the R&D 100 is an incredible honor,” said Paul J. Heney, Vice President, Editorial Director for R&D World. “These 100 winning products and technologies are the disruptors that will change industries and make the world a better place in the coming years.”

Analytical/Test Category:

QM Quantum Microscope – Next Generation Microscopy & Analysis
KMLabs, Inc.
JILA at the University of Colorado, the STROBE center

Winners of the R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World magazine and its new parent company, WTWH Media, LLC.

We are proud to announce that the QM Quantum Microscope™ is one of this year’s winners.  The QM Quantum Microscope builds on the company’s world leading technology in high harmonic generation to enable a range of techniques including coherent diffraction imaging, photoemission, pump-probe spectroscopy, and EUV metrology.

Primary Contributors to the project include:

JILA: Michael Tanksalvala, Yuka Esashi, Christina Porter, Michael Gerrity, Ting Liao, Margaret Murnane

KMLabs: Seth Cousin, Daisy Raymondson, Brennan Peterson, Henry Kapteyn

“Microscopes illuminated by coherent extreme UV beams are extremely sensitive to structure, composition and function at the nanoscale. They represent an entirely new class of lab scale microscope, with unique capabilities that are critical for future semiconductor, energy, solid state chemistry, and quantum devices.’ Henry Kapteyn, CTO.

About KMLabs: KMLabs is the only commercial provider for comprehensive, end-to-end research systems that leverage ultrafast pulses of extreme UV and soft X-ray light for a variety of experiments. The QM Quantum Microscope™ builds on the company’s world leading technology in high harmonic generation to enable a range of techniques including coherent diffraction imaging, photoemission, pump-probe spectroscopy, and EUV metrology. In addition, KMLabs continues to pioneer the development and engineering of standalone short wavelength sources including the Y-Fi VUV laboratory-based vacuum ultraviolet femtosecond laser source, and the Pantheon™ platform, a pulsed EUV source-beamline to generate and deliver EUV photons to user-supplied experimental stations.

A new paper in Nature Photonics from researchers at CU Boulder details impressive improvements in the ability to control the propagation and interaction of light in complex media such as tissue—an area with many potential applications in the medical field. Published Monday, the paper is titled “Wavefront shaping in complex media with a 350 kHz modulator via a 1D-to-2-D transform.” The work was carried out in Professor Rafael Piestun’s lab in the Electrical, Energy and Computing Engineering Department. The team included CU Boulder post-doctoral researchers Omer Tzang and Simon Labouesse, researcher Eyal Niv and CU Boulder graduate student Sakshi Singh. Greg Myatt from Silicon Light Machines, a collaborating company in this project, also worked with the group.

For the first time scientists have watched iron and platinum atoms crystallise in 4D – not only observing their arrangement in space but tracking them over time. Their observations clash with classical nucleation theory, which describes the early stages of a phase transition, adding to growing evidence that the textbook theory is outdated and imprecise.