AskScience AMA Series: I'm Giulio Guzzinati and I use transmission electron microscopes to look at the nanoworld and play around with the wave functions of electrons. |
- AskScience AMA Series: I'm Giulio Guzzinati and I use transmission electron microscopes to look at the nanoworld and play around with the wave functions of electrons.
- Is there any dry land on Earth composed of oceanic crust?
- Do coal plants give off radiation?
- Is there an instance in which land is subducted under land instead of converging?
- What exactly is “Muscle Memory”?
- If I placed a sufficiently large block of lead, or other dense, massive object, next to one of the arms of the LIGO detector, would its gravitational influence be detectable by LIGO?
- How much bacteria is actually killed in a Microwave or Oven?
- How does the Pilot wave theory explaine the collapse of the interference pattern upon placing a detector at one of the slits in the double slit experiment?
- How were the photographs of Betelgeuse taken?
- How are fast neutrons and thermal (slow) neutrons created in a fission reaction?
- Why induction pans must be ferromagnetic?
- Why is nomex (meta-aramid fiber) heat resistant?
- What physically happens when you adapt to colder regions?
- Does the brain control anything that isn't a muscle?
- Why don't mangroves grow in temperate climates?
- How do cells use energy from ATP for movement?
- Question about severe dehydration?
| Posted: 25 Feb 2020 04:00 AM PST Hi Reddit! I'm a physicists who works with with electron microscopes, particularly transmission electron microscopes (or TEMs), to look at the nanoworld and/or play around with the wave functions of electrons. I'm originally from Italy and I work in EMAT, an electron microscopy laboratory in Antwerp, Belgium. Here ~70 researchers can use 6 TEMs study a wide variety of materials science topics, from the cathodes of Li ion batteries to the mechanics of shape memory alloys, from magnetic ceramic oxides to nanoparticle catalysts. Why do we need electrons to image the nanoscale? The resolution of conventional optical microscopes is limited by the wavelength of the light used (0.4 µm for blue light). Electrons however are also waves, and fast electrons (i.e. accelerated with a tension above, say, 30000 Volts) have an extremely short wavelength, of only a few picometers. Using electromagnetic fields we can steer and focus these electrons beams just like we do on light by using glass lenses. We get resolutions all the way down to 0.05 nm, that is a twentieth of a millionth of a millimeter (or 2 billionths of an inch in freedom units). This is such a good resolution, that it allows us to even look at the atoms that make up solid materials! (No, seriously, how cool is that??) We use these capabilities to study the link between the microscopic structure and shape of materials and their macroscopic properties. My personal focus is on the development of methodologies, that is I try to find ways to use or misuse electron microscopes to measure the proporties of the samples with better precision, clarity or even study things that we couldn't before. For instance, I recently demonstrated a new method to measure deformations (strain) in materials with nanometer resolution with a precision of up to 1 part in 5000, which is very important when prototyping or producing semiconductor devices. A more exotic interest of mine is that of wave function manipulation. Since the state and properties of the electrons are defined by their wavefunction, we can give them new and interesting properties intentionally changing the wavefunction. It's a bit like having a quantum sandbox. I did plenty of research on electron vortex beams, a weird type of beam rotating around its own axis which therefore possesses it's own magnetic moment, and interacts with mangnetic fields in a peculiar way, but also others such as the Airy waves, which possess freakish properties such as accelerating in absence of external forces. If you want to know more about my research, here is my Google Scholar profile, all of my articles on the arXiv. I will be here between 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC, 18:00 CET) and 16:00 EST (21:00 UTC, 22:00 CET) to answer your questions. Giulio [link] [comments]  |
| Is there any dry land on Earth composed of oceanic crust? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 10:04 AM PST Any region, no matter how small. I was looking at a map of plate boundaries and it seems that all oceanic crust is below sea level; but I was wondering if there were any exceptions. [link] [comments]  |
| Do coal plants give off radiation? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 05:44 PM PST |
| Is there an instance in which land is subducted under land instead of converging? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 10:22 PM PST |
| What exactly is “Muscle Memory”? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 07:19 AM PST How does practicing a skill, let's say tennis, one day; effect your future performance in days/months time. Is it mainly the strengthening of neural pathways that relates to muscle behaviour, or is it more complex? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Feb 2020 09:40 PM PST |
| How much bacteria is actually killed in a Microwave or Oven? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 01:16 PM PST Weve all reheated food in an oven or microwave and accidentally left it in there longer than intended. Sometimes overnight, sometimes just for an hour. I know heat generally kills germs, being a main point of cooking in the first place, as well as radiation kills everything living. That being said, lets say I had some food microwaved for a full minute, and just leave it in there for a week. Would there be mold in it now? Or is everything so dead, that life cannot exist. Same thing for something being in an oven, except lets say the food was there for an hour or 2 at 400 degrees(F). [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 24 Feb 2020 12:52 PM PST I get the collapse of the wavefunction in the Copenhagen interpretation, does the same happen to the wavefunction in pilot wave theory? If so why, and also when does it happen, immediately when the detector is placed even before the particle is close to the slit? [link] [comments]  |
| How were the photographs of Betelgeuse taken? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 04:38 AM PST In astronomy 101 I learned that stars are point sources of light. Even the most powerful optical telescope cannot resolve a star into a disk. If this is still true, how were the recent photographs of Betelgeuse taken? Are these photographs at all or are they digital representations of spectrographic data? (with apologies to the moderators for second pass at this) [link] [comments]  |
| How are fast neutrons and thermal (slow) neutrons created in a fission reaction? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 09:44 AM PST I'm studying nuclear reactions and I came across the notion of fast neutrons and thermal neutrons and I can't quite wrap my head around it.. Aren't all neutrons resulting from a nuclear fission roughly the same speed? What I mean by this is, the instant the nucleus undergoes fission, aren't the neutrons ejected at roughly the same speed? If so, are thermal neutrons slow only because they bounced around a lot and thus got slowed down by molecules? And fast neutrons are just "lucky" ones? Thanks in advance [link] [comments]  |
| Why induction pans must be ferromagnetic? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 11:14 AM PST From my understanding, in order to generate heat in an induction cooktop, you need Foucault currents inside the material. This generates the electric energy that will be dissipated as heat by the pan acting as a resistor. The thing is, to generate those currents the only requisite is that there is a variable magnetic field acting on a conductor, so there's no ferromagnetism acting there. My only guesses are that either those currents are amplified by the magnetic field created by the ferromagnetic material or that the resistance of the material is somehow dependant on the magnetic response of the material. (Or I'm completely wrong in the physics behind it) Thanks in advance [link] [comments]  |
| Why is nomex (meta-aramid fiber) heat resistant? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 06:13 AM PST Nomex shows excellent heat resistance. At molecular level, what makes it heat resistant? For example, kevlar has high tensile strength due to H-bonding. Similarly what makes nomex heat resistant. [link] [comments]  |
| What physically happens when you adapt to colder regions? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 09:18 AM PST I recently moved to Buffalo, NY from Southern California and it got me curious as to how the body adapts to cold. [link] [comments]  |
| Does the brain control anything that isn't a muscle? Posted: 23 Feb 2020 09:55 PM PST I was thinking about the signals that go into and out of the brain. There's plenty of variety of what goes in: sight, sound, balance, taste, temperature, pain... the list is nearly endless. But when it comes to output, I couldn't think of anything that wasn't a muscle. The heart's a muscle. Vocal cords are a muscle. Eye movement is controlled by muscles. Does the brain control anything that's not a muscle? [link] [comments]  |
| Why don't mangroves grow in temperate climates? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 07:03 AM PST Somebody asked this question in a thread about DnD, and it made me really curious. Mangroves grow almost exclusively in the tropics. Swamps grow in the South, but never the more temperate zones. Is there any particular reason that how wet or dry a forest is seems to be correlated with latitude? [link] [comments]  |
| How do cells use energy from ATP for movement? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 05:53 AM PST How does the energy from chemical bonds power biomechanical processes? [link] [comments]  |
| Question about severe dehydration? Posted: 24 Feb 2020 09:29 AM PST Remember at the end of WWII when the Jews were liberated from the concentration camps and the allies gave them food and because they had been starved for so long, eating a bunch of food actually killed some of the survivors? My question is can the same thing happen with dehydration: can you be so severely dehydrated that drinking a shitload of water will kill you or is it totally fine to drink like crazy. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
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