Closest Ever Look at Picasso, and New Utlimate Resolution in X-ray Microscopy, Aug. 29

Volker Rose with the prototype high-resolution microscope at the APS/CNM nanoprobe beamline on APS Sector 26.

Can new synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy allow researchers to look even closer—down to atomic resolution with X-ray microsopy? And what happens when imaging of nanoscale materials with chemical, electronic, and magnetic contrast is applied to Picasso’s paint and other nanoscale materials? The Condensed Matter & Surface Sciences 2013-14 colloquium series presents Dr. Volker Rose, of Argonne National Laboratory, at 4:10 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 29, in Walter Lecture Hall 245.

“Shining Light on Nanoscale Materials: From Picasso to the Ultimate Resolution in X-ray Microscopy” is a presentation likely to interest College of Fine Arts faculty as well as students and faculty from the College of Arts & Sciences. Rose is a physicist in Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials.

“The utility of X-ray techniques as a tool for local characterization of nanoscale materials properties has undergone rapid development in recent years [1]. Owing to a confluence of improvements in synchrotron source brightness, focusing optics fabrication, detection, and data analysis, nanoscale X-ray imaging techniques have moved beyond proof-of-principle experiments to play a central role in synchrotron research programs worldwide with high-impact applications made to materials science questions. In this talk, we will discuss examples of the current state of our synchrotron-based, hard X-ray nanoscale microscopy research. As an example, we will discuss our recent research on Picasso paints. We will further review our development of a novel high-resolution microscopy technique for imaging of nanoscale materials with chemical, electronic, and magnetic contrast, called synchrotron x-ray scanning tunneling microscopy (SXSTM) [2]. It will combine the sub-nanometer spatial resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy with the chemical, electronic, and magnetic sensitivity of synchrotron radiation. The technique has the potential to drastically increase the spatial resolution of existing state-of-the-art x-ray microscopy from only tens of nanometers down to atomic resolution.” says Rose.