About event
It is our great honour that Professor Ondrej Krivanek joins the ranks of honorary science degree Doctor Honoris Causa awardees of Masaryk University, as a world-renowned scientific visionary whose achievements are the source of inspiration to all of Masaryk University, CEITEC, as well as to one of the world´s key centres of electron microscopy – Brno. Electron microscopy allows us to see things invisible to the naked eye: atomic arrangements in solids and biological objects such as viruses. It is often called “the eyes of science”. The instruments and techniques developed by Ondrej Krivanek and his collaborators have made the eyes sharper, and able to see entirely new things. In his talk, following the honorary doctorate ceremony, Ondrej Krivanek will speak about the amazing possibilities and untapped potential of electron microscopy and spectroscopy in 21st century.
Ondrej Krivanek is a world-renowned physicist, instrument designer and technique developer, who has made many pioneering advances in electron microscopy and its instrumentation. Ondrej Krivanek is a co-founder of Nion and has been its President for over 20 years. He is also an Affiliate Professor at Arizona State University. His many pioneering advances have been recognized by a number of awards, including the prestigious Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, which he received in 2020, the Cosslett Medal from the International Federation of Microscopy Societies, the Duddell Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics, and the Seto Award from the Japanese Microscopy Society. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the Microscopy Society of America, the Microanalysis Society, and of the American Physical Society, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.
Programme
Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopy for the 21st Century
Ondřej L. Křivánek
The electron microscope (EM) is a powerful instrument for analyzing the structure and properties of matter, all the way down to atoms, matter’s building blocks. Without EMs, we would not know what viruses look like, or that an atom of silicon can be bonded in a graphene sheet in two fundamentally different ways, or that ordinary silica glass can be made as thin as three atoms. And we would not have devices such as smartphones whose powerful chips need tiny transistors, whose manufacture is only possible because we can see with an EM how well we managed to manufacture them.
Following the electron microscope’s invention in 1931, each subsequent decade brought fundamental improvements in its capabilities and its range of applications. But from around 1980 on, progress begun to slow down, as EM technology matured and fundamental limits due to the intrinsic aberrations of electron lenses and the energy spread of electron sources were reached.
The progress was reinvigorated by two fundamental developments: working aberration correctors allowed the spatial resolution to be improved by about 3x starting in the late 1990s, and monochromators narrowed the energy spread of the electron beam, allowing the energy resolution of spectroscopic analysis to improve by around 100x, from the 2010s on. These developments have made electron microscopy in the 21st century very different from the 20th: atoms can now be resolved with ease in a wide variety of materials, and spectroscopy in the EM has progressed to the point where the vibrational signature of a single atom can be recorded and analyzed.
Our company, Nion, has played a key role in both these developments. My talk will review how the developments came about, and illustrate their usefulness with examples of practical applications.
Ondrej Krivanek´s talk will be followed by moderated discussion led by Pavel Tomancak, director of CEITEC consortium. This event is open to the wider scientific community and should connect the sharpest minds from various disciplines ranging from microscope developers up to material and life scientists.
This event is open only to registered participants. Please fill out the registration form below.
