News

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.

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

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.

Crystals form in storm clouds, metals, drug molecules, and even in diseased tissues. Despite their ubiquity, scientists still don’t fully understand what happens when a liquid solution first starts to form a solid crystal, a step called nucleation. Now researchers have gotten their first glimpse of the details of the process, imaging individual atoms during nucleation in metal nanoparticles (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1317-x).

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.

Results of UCLA-led study contradict a long-held classical theory.

Everyday transitions from one state of matter to another — such as freezing, melting or evaporation — start with a process called “nucleation,” in which tiny clusters of atoms or molecules (called “nuclei”) begin to coalesce. Nucleation plays a critical role in circumstances as diverse as the formation of clouds and the onset of neurodegenerative disease.

A UCLA-led team has gained a never-before-seen view of nucleation — capturing how the atoms rearrange at 4D atomic resolution (that is, in three dimensions of space and across time). The findings, published in the journal Nature, differ from predictions based on the classical theory of nucleation that has long appeared in textbooks.