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.
Congratulations to Diana Rossell-Eddy for winning the first place poster prize at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics! The APS CUWiP goal is to help undergraduate women continue in physics by providing them with the opportunity to experience a professional conference, information about graduate school and professions in physics, and access to other women in physics of all ages with whom they can share experiences, advice, and ideas.
Catherine Groschner of Mary Scott’s research group at the University of California, Berkeley was awarded a 2019 M&M Student Scholar Award for her presentation titled, “Machine Learning for High Throughput HRTEM Analysis”.
Laura Waller has been selected as a 2019 AIMBE Fellow. The College of Fellows – 2,000 individuals who are outstanding bioengineers in academia, industry, clinical practice, and government. These leaders in the field have distinguished themselves through their contributions in research, industrial practice and/or education. Fellows are nominated each year by their peers and represent the top 2% of the medical and biological engineering community. They are considered the life-blood of AIMBE and work towards realizing AIMBE’s vision to provide medical and biological engineering innovation for the benefit of humanity.
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?
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.
Namrata is a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, 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.
In 2019, David Cesar received the Particle Accelerator Science & Technology (PAST) Doctoral Student Award from IEEE for contributions to dielectric laser accelerators and time-resolved electron microscopy.
Rafael Piestun for received the 2019 Lab Venture Challenge Award for Ultrathin Endoscopes. Through the Lab Venture Challenge, Venture Partners at CU Boulder funds the top innovations showing high commercial potential, a clear path to a compelling market, and strong scientific support. In just the last 3 years, more than 20 commercially promising projects at CU Boulder have received funding through this program. Those same awards are associated with 16 new startup companies, with many having already raised further capital, demonstrating a powerful way to advance innovative research and translate it into impactful business ventures.
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.