A scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy has won national recognition for images created with an electron microscope.

A scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy has won national recognition for images created with an electron microscope.

Dr Rafal Dunin-Borkowski is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a member of the Department's Electron Microscopy Group. The images were entered in the 'Science close-up' category of the Visions of Science 2001 competition.

The competition was intense with over 700 images submitted by scientists, photographers and healthcare professionals representing every area of science, including medicine, biology, engineering and chemistry. The winning images show dividing prostate cancer cells, human chromosomes, carbon atoms, unusual bacteria and seed growth in artistic, creative and thought-provoking ways.

Dr Dunin-Borkowski's winning images are a product of his work mapping the magnetic and electric fields in nanostructured materials. He is particularly interested in materials which have the potential to be used to create hard disk drives.

Dr Dunin-Borkowski confesses that his walls are covered with images similar to the ones he submitted to Visions of Science and that the aesthetic appeal of such pictures is something which draws people to the field of electron microsocopy. Electron microscopes use electrons rather than light to create images, acting as a very large slide projector able to magnify to the power of almost 10 million, a scale so large you can almost see atoms.

Dr Dunin-Borkowski says that his award-winning images are typical of the striking and beautiful pictures which he and his colleagues produce every day in the course of their work. The team share the best images amongst themselves but they rarely achieve a wider audience. Now Dr Dunin-Borkowski's winning pictures will form part of an exhibition of the competition's best pictures, which will be on show at science and photographic venues around the country (see Visions of Science website for further details).

The image at the top of the page is entitled 'Crystal in a nanotube'. It shows the walls of a tube of carbon atoms (shown as yellow lines) enclosing a crystal of potassium iodide just three atoms wide. The sharp peaks show the regular arrangement of the atoms in the crystal.


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