Transition-metal oxides are a class of high-performance catalysts with great potential, but the way in which they govern electrochemical reactions that turn fuel into energy remains poorly understood. Jin Suntivich, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, hopes to change that by studying catalysts in a new way, and he has been awarded $750,000 by the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2017 Early Career Research Program.

Joress is a PhD candidate in the Cornell Materials Science Department, and has been very active at CHESS since his arrival in the fall of 2012. His particular interest has been the study of fast processes in real time, especially chemical reactions and phase transitions in thin films, and he has co-authored over a dozen publications in this area.

Indeed, students from the Applied Learning Experiences photography class at Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) took hundreds of pictures during their visit to CHESS during the month of October. “It is a visually fascinating place,” said Harry Littell, Associate Professor and Chair of Photography at TC3, “And fun to try to imagine the physics taking place amidst the spaghetti of wires and equipment. I like seeing the precision machinery augmented with tinfoil and duct tape."

At a later stage, 3-nucleotide RNA sequences are translated into protein according to the genetic code.

The work was done at CHESS and APS by JIANQIU GUO ,YU YANG, BALAJI RAGHOTHAMACHAR, MICHAEL DUDLEY from SUNY Stony Brook and by CHESS Staff Scientist STAN STOUPIN (before he moved to CHESS).

Bunches of particles circulate around the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) at nearly the speed of light. Each one centimeter-long bunch consists of some billions of particles. In a blink of an eye the bunch of particles has traveled around the 768m circumference ring nearly 1,000,000 times.

The particles in the bunch emit photons as they speed around the ring. The photon emission heats up the particles in the bunch, where the hot particles expand and spread out. An otherwise bright beam is made dimmer, compromising its effectiveness as a tool for research.

These nanoparticles can find immediate applications in active and living systems for various purposes, such as self-propelled activity, environmental sensor, drug delivery and so on. Unlike chemistry-based techniques which take hours, this newly launched mechanical fabrication approach takes only several minutes at current stage. This breakthrough result has been reported at the early on-line release on 8 June 2017 at the Journal of the American Chemical Society [1].