Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

Currently the strong focus on energy producing and environmental protecting technologies relies on the advancement of new functional nanomaterials. Inevitably, detailed atomic-scale insight into the geometrical, compositional and electronic structures of these nanomaterials is of paramount importance to establish a detailed understanding of the structure-performance relationships of the nanomaterials that eventually forms the basis for rational design of new, improved functional nanostructures.
With the recent advancements, scanning / transmission electron microscopy (S/TEM) has become a powerful and indispensable tool for characterizing nanomaterials with a spatial resolution in the sub-Angstrom range, with an spectral resolution in the sub-eV range, and with a sensitivity for detecting even single atoms.
Although these recent improvements in microscope performance offer bright research prospects they also include a set of new methodological challenges. My research is mainly focusing on methodological aspects of state-of-the-art electron microscopy. For instance, it is very captivating to study the effect of aberrations and electron energy spreads on the image/probe forming process in S/TEM and the achievable resolution as well as sensitivity in order to fully exploit these methods in unraveling the atomic scale realm of functionalized (in)organic nanostructures and to further advance the limits for achievable information towards atomic resolution in full 3-D (electron tomography). The work includes examples for a variety of materials done in a collaborative approach with university groups and at industrial laboratories.