Dr. Gianluigi Botton presents Using Electrons and Photons for Materials Characterization: Using the Best of Both Worlds

Using Electrons and Photons for Materials Characterization: Using the Best of Both Worlds

Gianluigi Botton

Dept of Materials Science and Eng., McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario, L9H 4L7, Canada and

Canadian Light Source, 44 Innovation Blvd, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 2V3, Canada

Materials characterization is a key component of the materials innovation cycle. New tools are now available to discover the crystalline structure, composition, chemical bond and arrangement of atom with electron beams smaller than 1Å. While physicists, chemists and materials scientists benefit tremendously from these improvements, we need to be mindful of the fact that there are many other tools that provide complementary information and that there are limitations to all techniques. In this presentation, I will show some recent examples of state-of-the-art electron microscopy work related to battery materials, plasmonic nanostructures and the detection of phonon excitations in crystals. Then I will focus on complementary photon-based techniques that are available at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron. With photon energies ranging from sub-meV to over 100keV, there is a wealth of information that can be extracted from imaging, spectroscopy and scattering methods, from bonding environments of catalysts and the electronic structure of surfaces, to imaging of cochlear implants, spectroscopy in-operando conditions and trace contaminants in living tissues. These examples highlight the benefits of considering multiple techniques when one needs to understand the structure and composition of a very broad range of samples.