The many top international scientists YUCOMAT has welcomed as participants over the years, and the excellent science presented and discussed here, send the signal out to the world: science knows no borders

Professor Dr. Knut Urban, the laureate of the 2023 MRS- Serbia Award for a Lasting and Outstanding Contribution to Materials Science and Engineering talks to YUCOMAT about great leaps in science and nanoworld.

Prof. Dr. Knut Urban’s plenary lecture will be presented during the Opening Ceremony of
the 24^th MRS-Serbia Annual Conference YUCOMAT 2023, at 9.00 am on September 04, 2023

Professor Urban, you are one of the pioneers of aberration-corrected electron optics. And you have received a number of scientific awards for it together with Harald Rose and Max Haider. Why is it of such great importance and at the same time so difficult to build electron microscopes with aberration-corrected optics?

According to the theory of lens optics and diffraction of waves, the dimension of the smallest details that one can just resolve in an object inspected in a microscope is at best of the order of the wavelength of the radiation used for imaging. In light optics, Ernst Abbe showed in the seventies of the nineteenth century that such quasi-ideal microscopic imaging can be achieved even with real, i.e., aberration-prone, lenses, if one uses systems of lenses, converging lenses and diverging lenses, calculated in such a way that their errors as a whole largely compensate each other. This marked the triumph of classical light microscopy, whose resolution limit today is actually wavelength-limited, at about 200 nm.

Since the wavelength of fast electrons is about 5 orders of magnitude shorter, it was hoped that after the invention of the electron microscope by Ernst Ruska, 1931, and Manfred von Ardenne, 1937, there would be a corresponding increase in resolving power and thus access to atomic dimensions. However, these hopes were disappointed. Despite the greatest efforts in academia and industry, by the end of the nineteen-eighties the resolution had reached at best about 0.5 nm. Resolving atomic distances in solids (< 0.1 nm) was out of reach, which seemed particularly tragic at a time when nanoscience (my field of work) was experiencing its first flowering. The reason for this was due to the failure to construct aberration-corrected electron optics. In fact, the insurmountable obstacle to this was a law of nature, Gauss's law of magnetism. According to this law, it is fundamentally impossible to use round magnetic fields to construct the diverging lens that according to Abbe is needed to realize corrected lens systems. To overcome a law of nature is indeed a formidable task. And although Otto Scherzer had already shown in 1947 that - in theory - it should be possible to construct a diverging lens by means of systems of non-circular lenses, multipoles, until 1991, when we started our project, one had made progress, but was still very far from success.

Read the full interview here!

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