What if we could know everything there was to know about the structure of a piece of material? Complete knowledge would constitute something like a list of all the 3D positions of all atoms, with the element of each atom specified, and measurement of all the electronic states at high resolution in real and momentum space. Modern electron microscopy cannot provide quite all of that information, but it can get surprisingly close. This talk will introduce the scanning transmission electron microscope instrument, then provide examples of cutting-edge applications measure atomic structure and defects and in a variety of materials and in various sample environments.

Paul Voyles is Professor and Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Beckwith-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned degrees in physics from Oberlin College and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, then worked as a post-doctoral member of technical staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ. He joined the UW-Madison in 2002 as an Assistant Professor. His research specialty is the structure of materials, investigated primarily with electron microscopy, supplemented by simulations and data science. He has worked in materials for microelectronics and spintronics, superconductors, and on metallic and other glasses. He co-leads the interdisciplinary research group Stability in Glasses in the UW-Madison NSF MRSEC. He has published over 150 journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings.

Online registration ends Friday, October 5.