8/29/2018 Miranda Holloway
Professors from the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant.
Written by Miranda Holloway
Professors from the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant.
The grant supports the purchase of an electron energy-loss spectrometer, which will be added to a dynamic environmental transmission electron microscope.
Assistant Professor Renske van der Veen of Chemistry is the principal investigator on the grant, and is accompanied by four co-principal investigators: Professor Jian-Min Zuo of Materials Science of Engineering, Associate Professor Prashant Jain of Chemistry, and Assistant Professors Pinshane Huang and Qian Chen of Materials Science and Engineering.
An electron energy-loss spectrometer measures the changes in energy distribution of an electron beam of known energy that is transmitted through a thin sample being analyzed. Each interaction between the electron beam and the sample produces a change in energy that is characteristic of the atoms that make up the material.
"The new instrument will essentially be a chemiscope, [which is] capable of capturing element-specific snapshots of evolving nanostructures and soft materials undergoing temperature-, gas-, voltage-, or light-induced chemical transformations on very short time scales ranging from femtoseconds-milliseconds," van der Veed said.
This tool will be a major regional and national resource for in situ chemical mapping of nanomaterials. MRL is a nationally-recognized user facility and the new spectrometer will provide numerous research opportunities and education for the next-generation of scientists and engineers.
"Our interdisciplinary team is very excited to receive this instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. It will enable discoveries in heterogeneous catalysis, polymer physics, electrochemical charge transport, biofunctional interfaces, and ultrafast materials switching, which are critical for example in clean energy generation, biomedical imaging, flexible electronics, and information storage," van der Veen said.
This award is one of two recent MRI awards that will benefit MRL.