Caught in the act: understanding how crystals grow by watching the movies

Gordon seminar by Prof. Frances Ross from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of MIT. 🗒️ SUMMARY We can watch crystals grow in an electron microscope by adding atoms one at a time onto a clean surface. The movies tell us a lot about kinetics and thermodynamics but can also be entertaining, frustrating, or both at the same time. This talk attempts to share the joy of this type of ‘in-situ’ microscopy as we aim to understand how atoms assemble into nanowires or nanocrystals and use the information to control the formation of more complicated nanostructures whose properties might make them useful for new types of electronic devices. 👤 BIOGRAPHY Frances M. Ross is Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. She received her B.A. in Physics and Ph.D. in Materials Science from Cambridge University, UK, where she became captivated by electron microscopy. She continued this interest during her postdoc at A.T.&T. Bell Laboratories, as a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and as a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Her research is based around the development of in-situ electron microscopy techniques to help understand crystal growth, epitaxy, self-assembly and electrochemical andother liquid phase processes. 💭 ARMOURERS AND BRASIERS' CAMBRIDGE FORUM The Armourers and Brasiers' Cambridge Forum is held annually at the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy in Cambridge with the aim of raising the profile of materials science in the UK academic and industrial communities, while being international in scope. The Forum attracts high-level involvement from industry, research councils and other influential bodies. It incorporates the Kelly Lecture and the Gordon Seminars, inaugurated in 1999 to mark the opening of the Gordon Laboratory in the Department. It is generously supported by the Armourers and Brasiers' Livery Company, AWE, the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining, the Materials Processing Institute, Rolls Royce, and TWI. The event was held on 23rd June 2021, and the full programme can be found here: https://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/sites/defau... 🖥️ Check out our websites: https://linktr.ee/cumaterials