August 2006 Archives

HORIBA, Ltd. has announced the prizewinners of the 2006 Masao Horiba Awards; Dr. Yasuko Terada, Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute for "Innovation and Application of X-ray Microbeam Fluorescence Analysis Using High-energy Radiation", Dr. Hisashi Hayashi, Japan Women's University for "Development of New X-ray Spectrometry Using Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering", and Professor Koen Janssens, University of Antwerp, Belgium for "X-ray Based Speciation of Major and Trace Constituents in Heterogeneous Materials of Environmental and Cultural Heritage Origin". In addition, Professor Masami Ando, Tokyo University of Science was selected as the winner of the Masao Horiba Special Award for "Development of a System for Early Diagnosis of Breast Cancer". The awards ceremony and a discussion session between the prizewinners and academic and research experts will be held at the Shiran Kaikan, Kyoto University on Tuesday, October 17. For more information, visit http://www.jp.horiba.com/index_e.htm

At the Forschungszentrum Rossendorf (FZR) in Dresden, Germany, the second undulator of the free-electron laser facility has gone into operation, producing light up to the hard-to-access range of the deep far infrared. The Dresden FEL now covers the wavelength range, invisible to humans, from 3 to 150 micrometers. The asset of every free-electron laser is its tunability, i.e., the wavelength or the color of the light can be adjusted at will over a large range. Scientists at FZR have a particular interest in this far-infrared light, which is located between the ranges of microwaves and the infrared and is often called Terahertz (THz) radiation. At FZR, THz radiation is used in particular to study the dynamical behavior of electrons in semiconductor nanostructures. For more information, contact Annette Weissig, Phone +49-351-260-3688, a.weissig@fz-rossendorf.de, http://www.fz-rossendorf.de/

Neville Smith, scientific director for the Advanced Light Source of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading authority in the field of photoemission spectroscopy, died on August 18, 2006, at age 64, unexpectedly of cancer. A native of England with a PhD in physics from Cambridge University, he moved to the US in 1966. After post-doctoral research at Stanford University under photoemission spectroscopy pioneer William Spicer, he joined the staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and continued the study of the electronic structure of solids and surfaces for 25 years. In 1991, Dr Smith was awarded the prestigious Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society for his contributions to the development of momentum-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. In 1994, he was named as the first scientific program head of the Advanced Light Source (ALS). Under his leadership, the ALS scientific program thrived. "It is not the number of warm bodies on the floor but the quality of science produced that is the true measure of a user facility's success," Dr. Smith once said. During his tenure as scientific director, the number of scientific users of the ALS grew from a few hundred to several thousand. There will be no funeral, but a memorial service to celebrate Smith's life will be held in the fall.

The following awards were presented during the plenary session of the 55th Annual Denver X-Ray Conference:
The 2006 Birks Award: Peter Wobrauschek, Atominstitut, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria.
The 2006 Jerome B. Cohen Student Award (two recipients): Hanfei Yan, Columbia University, New York, NY, and Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL won the award for his work "Dynamical Artifacts in X-ray Diffraction from Single Crystals"; Wanchuck Woo, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN won the award for his work "In-Situ Time-Resolved Neutron Diffraction Measurement of Transient Material States during a Thermo-Mechanical Process Based on Quasi-Steady State Principle".
The 2006 Hanawalt Award: Peter Wallace, Dos Arroyos Enterprises, Oro Valley, AZ.

Scientists at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) led by Dr W. Utsumi have proved that the formation of bulk metallic glass of elemental Zr and Ti, which was recently reported (see for example, Zhang and Zhao, Nature 430, 332 (2004) and Y. Wang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 155501 (2005)) was some sort of phantom. The experiment basically took the form of X-ray diffraction in high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, but in addition to the normal energy-dispersive detector, the research group employed an in situ angular-dispersive X-ray diffractometer equipped with a 2D detector and X-ray transparent anvils. The disappearance of all the Bragg peaks in the one-dimensional energy-dispersive data could be taken as evidence of amorphization. However, the research group found several intense Bragg spots in their angular-dispersive data, even in the exact same conditions where amorphization was reported. This indicates that Zr and Ti do not form glass, but that the grains grow rapidly. The experiments were carried out at BL14B1 and BL22XU, SPring-8, Japan. For more information, see the paper, "Does Bulk Metallic Glass of Elemental Zr and Ti Exist?", T. Hattori et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 96, 255504 (2006).