As Associate Professor and Director of the Electron Microscopy Facility in the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Paulo Ferreira's research in nanomaterials is largely applied to alternative energies. Imaging at the atomic level is of particular importance in his work.
Dr. Ferreira recently obtained an image of single atoms in a carbon support, using the JEOL ARM-200F aberration corrected TEM at Kyushu University. This work, in collaboration with UT's student Brian Gawlik and the team at Kyushu, constituted by Prof. Matsumura, Prof. Higashida, Dr. Yamamoto and Mr. Daio, shows single atoms, atomic dimmers, and atomic clusters of gold in an amorphous carbon support.
"In the future, this type of images is going to be critical to observe how atoms move on material surfaces, which can lead to a fundamental understanding of diffusion laws as a function of scale. However, it is essential to have images with the level of quality and resolution possible with the ARM-200F JEOL instrument" he said.
Dr. Ferreira has co-authored three books, and has acted as a special advisor on Government Strategy for Science and Technology in Portugal.
(Courtesy of 1B. Gawlik, 2T. Daio, 3T. Yamamoto, 4K. Higashida, 3S. Matsumura, 1P.J. Ferreira)
1 Materials Science and Engineering Program, University of Texas at Austin, USA;
2 HVEM Laboratory, Kyushu University, Japan;
3 Dept. of Applied Quantum Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Kyushu University, Japan;
4 Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Kyushu University, Japan
Instrument: Double-corrected JEOL ARM; Spot size: 6C; Aperture: 30 µm CL aperture; Camera length: 6cm; STEM detector: ADF1 detector; Beam current: 68.1 pA; Convergent angle: 25 mrad; ADF collection angle: 90-170 mrad; Magnification: 10 M; Scan size: 1024 x 1024; Pixel size:0.02 nm x 0.02 nm; Dwell time: 32 µs/point