Materials Science Research Lecture
Abstract: The discovery and analysis of X-ray diffraction from crystals by Max von Laue, William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg in 1912 marked the birth of crystallography. Over the last century, crystallography has been fundamental to the development of many fields of science. However, many samples in materials science, physics, chemistry, nanoscience, geology, and biology are non-crystalline, and thus their 3D structures are not accessible by traditional crystallography. Overcoming this hurdle has required the development of new structure determination methods. In this talk, I will present two methods that can go beyond crystallography: coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) and atomic electron tomography (AET). In the first part of the talk, I will illustrate several important CDI methods and highlight some important applications using 3rd generation synchrotron radiation and X-ray free electron lasers. In the second part of the talk, I will present a general tomographic method, termed AET, for 3D structure determination of crystal defects and disordered materials at the single atomic level. As coherent X-ray sources and powerful electron microscopes are under rapid development around the world, we expect that CDI and AET will find broad applications in both the physical and biological sciences.
About the speaker: Jianwei (John) Miao is Professor of Physics & Astronomy and California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He received a Ph. D. in Physics, a M. S. in computer science, and an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Biomedical Engineering from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. After graduation, he became a Staff Scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University. In 2004, he moved to UCLA as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Full Professor in 2009. Miao is an internationally renowned pioneer in the development of novel imaging methods with X-rays and electrons, and has made contributions to theory, computation, and experiment.
Miao is the Deputy Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center on Real Time Functional Imaging (called STROBE), a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an Associate Editor for Science Advances, and Crystallography Reviews. His other honors include the Werner Meyer- Ilse Memorial Award (1999), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2006-2008), the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA (2006-2007), a Kavli Frontiers Fellowship (2010), a Theodore von Kármán Fellowship from the RWTH Aachen University in Germany (2013), the Microscopy Today Innovation Award (2013) and the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS) Fellowship, France (2015-2017). He has been a Guest Scientist of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan since 2004, and a Guest Professor of Zhejiang University in China since 2009.