Nanomaterials are extremely small objects (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter!). Synchrotrons are complex, giant machines, often covering an area the size of a football field. Frequently, however, these two worlds collide in an effort to understand the unusual properties that nanomaterials exhibit over their “bulk” counterparts. Dr. Ward will share stories of scientific collaboration—how scientists work together in order to apply Big Science to tackle Small Problems. 

With Dr. Matthew Ward, a post-doc at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS)

Illuminating Physics!!

STANYS Spring 2014 Conference

Cornell University, 401 Physical Sciences Building (PSB) Saturday, April 5th, 2014 “DNA and the Diffraction of Light”

Saturday, April 5th, 2014

• 09:00am – 09:30am  Registration and Continental Breakfast
• 09:30am – 09:45am  Welcoming Remarks – PSB 401
• 09:45am – 10:25am  Prof. Alex Gaeta, Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University.

ADC Inc., a maker of scientific instruments located just outside Ithaca, has licensed the high-pressure cryocooler, called HPC-201, and has just fulfilled its first order to a research center in Japan.

The licensing agreement is ADC’s first with Cornell. Company president Alex Deyhim says the product is garnering interest from potential buyers, and he’s thrilled to showcase the “amazing work” of Cornell scientists.

Perhaps the most conspicuous change is a reorganization of the user space (Figure 1), primarily to improve access and usability of the G2 and G3 areas, especially for large groups. Among the changes are the creation of a "G3 annex" space opposite the G3 hutch to store, maintain and prepare heavy equipment, such as UHV chambers, for in situ experiments. This space occupies Arthur Woll’s former office, which has been relocated to room 316 Wilson Lab.

Visiting students representing the next generation of physicists got a taste of life as a r

The work was carried out by CHESS operators Chris Whiting, John Conrad, and Engineer Tom Krawczyk with supervision by Operations Manager Chris Conolly & Vacuum Group Leader Bob Seeley, responding to a request by Scientist Ken Finkelstein.

The crucial property of a BHJ is a self-organized interspersed network of donor and acceptor materials that transport the charge produced by the absorption of sunlight to the respective electrodes. In semiconducting molecules and polymers the charge splitting works via a bound electron-hole pair, a so-called exciton. The exciton has a finite lifetime corresponding to a diffusion length of only 10 nm, before it recombines, and thus the exciton has to reach a donor-acceptor interface within this range; otherwise it will not contribute to the photo current.

During these three days, a group of 11 middle school teachers from the New York State areas of Syracuse, Tully, Ithaca and New York City met in Clark Hall (the new home to CLASSE Outreach) and went through a series of science and engineering activities put together by the outreach team.

These materials have mechanical and electrical properties that are useful in applications such as sonar and ultrasound. The more scientists understand about the nanoscale short-ranged “local structures” that exist inside relaxor ferroelectrics, the better materials we can develop for these and other applications.¹

The large number of individual sensors enables much higher count-rates than prior generations of detectors with the same functionality. One use of this combination of energy resolution and high count rate is to map the elemental composition of objects with breathtaking resolution in a much shorter time than was previously possible. Figure 1 represents what the combination of a synchrotron source and this new detector can do. The image is a false-color representation of potassium, calcium, and zinc concentrations in a dried, pressed iris flower.