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Author: ems

Author: ems

ECMA – Welcome to our latest members: Point Electronic GmbH

The EMS would like to welcome its latest ECMA member: Point Electronic GmbH Electronics and software for electron microscopes Point Electronic GmbH is an expert in scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes and micro analyzers. We develop, manufacture, and distribute turnkey technologies and instruments for electron microscopy. You can consult the whole list of our Corporate Members here. More info

EMS OPA 2024 results

The winners of the European Microscopy Outstanding Paper Awards for papers published in 2024 are: 1. Instrumentation and Technique Development.*J. C. Thiele, *E. Pfitzner and P. Kukura. Single-protein optical holography. Nature Photonics 18, 388–395 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01405-2 2. Materials Sciences.L. Zhang, M. H. Raza, R. Wu, K. Gruel, C. Dubourdieu, M. Hÿtch and C. Gatel. Quantification of interfacial charges in multilayered nanocapacitors by operando electron holography. Advanced Materials 37(4), 2413691 (2025)#. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202413691#(first published online: November 25, 2024) 3. Life Sciences.*P. B. Klar, *D. G. Waterman, *T. Gruene, D. Mullick, Y. Song, J. B. Gilchrist, C. D. Owen, W. Wen, I. Biran, L. Houben, N. Regev-Rudzki, R. Dzikowski, N. Marom, L. Palatinus, P. Zhang, L. Leiserowitz and M. Elbaum. Cryo-tomography and 3D electron diffraction reveal the polar habit and chiral structure of the malaria pigment crystal hemozoin. ACS Central Science 10(8), 1504–1514 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.4c00162 *equal contribution More about OPA

In Memory of Peter Hawkes (°1937 – † 20.11.2024)

It is with a great sadness that we learned that Peter Hawkes passed away at his home in Toulouse, France, he was 87 years old. This loss resonates all the more for the EMS as Peter was the founder of our European Society. Peter will be remembered by all who knew him as a remarkable scientist, communicator and educator who made fundamental and ground-breaking progress in the world of electron optics, aberrations and digital imaging. Peter’s first foray into electron microscopy and into electron optics in particular was when as a fresh graduate student in 1959 he joined the ‘Electron Microscopy Group’ headed by Ellis Cosslett in the Physics Department of the University of Cambridge. At that time the Physics Department was still occupying the historic Cavendish Laboratory in the middle of Cambridge, where both the electron and neutron were first discovered (by Thomson and Chadwick, respectively). Peter’s interest and expertise in both physics and mathematics made him an ideal PhD candidate to study the fundamentals of electron optics. Cosslett gave Peter a series of papers by the mathematician Peter Sturrock – who had completed his PhD with Cosslett a few years previously – and told him to apply Sturrock’s eikonal methods to the aberrations of quadrupoles and related multipole lenses. Peter focussed in particular on the relationship between system symmetry and permitted aberrations, with the ultimate goal of proposing ways to correct for lens aberrations, and, in particular, the dominant spherical aberration of round lenses. He discovered that whilst quadrupoles have an unwanted linear focussing effect, sextupoles have no linear focussing effect and have aberrations of exactly the same nature as the spherical aberration of round lenses. Unfortunately sextupoles do suffer from second-order effects and that was sufficiently problematic that Peter did not pursue the sextupole design further. Of course, some years later, first Beck and then Crewe, Rose and others, showed that sextupole doublets could indeed provide correction. After his PhD, Peter remained in Cosslett’s group as a post-doctoral Research Fellow funded through a number of different institutions. Peter has written of his time both at Peterhouse and Churchill College, two of the Cambridge colleges where Peter was a Fellow, with great affection. He revelled in college life, mixing with other academics across many disciplines, not just in Physics or Mathematics, but also biology, philosophy, history and archaeology. He would tell of his time on the wine committee at Churchill, with the ‘demanding’ job of tasting and buying quantities of wine to lay down in the college’s large wine cellars. Peter continued to work in the area of electron optics with Cosslett and his group throughout the 1960s and the first half on the 1970s. His work was stimulated through breakthroughs, for example, by Deltrap, showing quadrupoles and octopoles can correct spherical aberration, and by Hardy demonstrating the correction of chromatic aberration. In 1966, together with other experts in electron optics from around the world, Peter spent a month at Argonne National Laboratory in the US, at a workshop organised by Albert Crewe. The workshop was there to design a high voltage aberration-corrected microscope, which led to a proposal to the US government. Unfortunately, the proposal was not funded – perhaps it was too far ahead of its time. During the 1960s computers were beginning to make their mark in the world of electron microscopy, initially in the design of new electron optical systems. Towards the end of that decade Peter proposed to Cosslett that the group needed to also embrace the ideas of computer-based digital image processing (of electron micrographs) and consider purchasing a mini-computer to enable this. Cosslett suggested Peter apply for funds, which he duly did; the proposal was successful and a PDP-8 was acquired. The PDP-8 computer had 20 kilobytes of memory – tiny by today’s standards – and was about as large as a family fridge! Using this computer, Owen Saxton, who joined the Cosslett group in 1970, together with Ralph Gerchberg, devised the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm to solve the ‘phase problem’ by using an image and diffraction pattern from the same specimen area; this remarkably successful approach has now spread across many scientific fields. By 1974 the Physics Department in Cambridge was due to move out of town to a new building, the ‘New Cavendish’, in west Cambridge. Also, Cosslett was due to retire in 1975 and so there was a great deal of uncertainty as to how the Electron Microscope group would evolve. At that time, Peter received a letter from Bernard Jouffrey inviting him to join the CNRS Laboratory of Electron Optics (now CEMES) and set up a new research area in image processing. Toulouse was the home of the world’s first high voltage electron microscope and remains an important centre for electron microscopy development to this day. Peter took up the invitation, his application to the CNRS was successful, and he left Cambridge for Toulouse in 1975. He remained at the Toulouse Laboratory, becoming Director in 1987, until his retirement in 2002, when he became Emeritus Director of Research. Throughout his career, Peter was a prolific writer of articles, books and reviews. His first book, on ‘Quadrupole Optics’ was published in 1966, with many others published over the next 50 years or so. Peter’s collaboration with John Spence led to the books ‘Science of Microscopy’ and ‘Springer Handbook of Microscopy’. In the 1980s Peter began work on his seminal multi-volume book, with Erwin Kasper, ‘Principles of Electron Optics’, published first in 1989 with a second edition in 2017, the book’s name paying homage to Wolf’s ‘Principles of Optics’, a book which Peter thought to be one of the very best. He has written extensively on the history of electron microscopy and electron optics, including the history and development of aberration-corrected microscopes. In addition to his own research papers Peter would regularly publish wonderful ‘round-ups’ of key papers from the microscopy world, and key talks that had been given at major microscopy conferences. These were published in the journal Ultramicroscopy

EMC 2024 Report

Dear Members, Following the 17th European Microscopy Congress (EMC2024) held at the Bella Center in the Danish capital Copenhagen, August 26-30, 2024, you will find the exiting report from the EMC Chair Klaus Qvortrup. The 17th European Microscopy Congress (EMC2024) took place at the Bella Center in the Danish capital Copenhagen, August 26-30, 2024, with an attendance of 2,500 registrants from at least 51 countries, who had the opportunity to hear from researchers at various career levels from both academia and industry. Eight years have passed since the latest EMC (Lyon, 2016); in the meantime, the Covid pandemic most regrettably caused a last-minute cancellation of the attempted organized EMC2020 in Copenhagen. Accordingly, EMC2024 was planned in the wake of the pandemic at a time where we did not know whether physical conferences would ever happen again – at least to the same extent we have grown used to in the past. Fortunately, in Copenhagen 2024 it seemed as if all the unpleasant memories of the past pandemic were almost forgotten, even though most of the world was in lock-down less than 3 years before. Some prayers must have been taken into consideration, because even the late August weather was perfect for outdoor social activities. The 1,310 submitted abstracts for the three main symposia complemented the impressive number of registrants and paved the road for an extensive and dynamic conference programme spanning advances in Life Science, Physical Science, and Instrumentation & Methodology. Accordingly, EMC2024 featured six parallel tracks with 35 scientific sessions giving room for 422 oral presentations, 50 invited speakers, and 5 plenary and 775 poster presentations. Approximately 250 registrants decided to arrive early and attend one of the seven preconference workshops offered on the Sunday before conference kick-off. However, not only pre-conference workshop students had decided to arrive in good time, because the welcome reception Sunday evening welcomed more than 1,300 conference delegates for a truly memorable event. The spacious conference hall – shaped to host all EMC2024 scientific activities for the five full days − consisted of a plenary lecture theater seating 1,500 delegates, five breakaway theaters with a capacity of 350 pax each, and a generous poster area with a capacity of 400 posters. The trade exhibition was the centerpiece of the hall, featuring many of the world’s leading companies in the field. More than 500 registrants from the attending companies were on hand to show-case their latest cutting-edge instrumentation and accessories, and EMC2024 warmly welcomed a total of 105 exhibitors including 10 Open Science contributions and the two EMC2028 bidders, Brno and Barcelona. During the lunch breaks the five breakaway theatres were generously booked by the vendors for introduction and presentations of new technologies. Thursday evening, the Conference dinner at the Bella Center was jam-packed to capacity with 800 seated guests, who enjoyed a 3-course dinner accompanied by a full jazz big band in Sinatra style. The dance floor was quickly fully packed with happy conference delegates. Numerous feedbacks indicate that all attendants – academia and vendors − had a great, busy, and productive time at EMC2024. Taken into consideration that the pandemic with lock-down precautions had just been left behind us, my personal outstanding memory would probably the great pleasure of seeing the buzzing activity in the conference hall. Colleagues finally catching up in person, the impressive activity with all the vendors’ booths, and four days of truly amazing activity in the poster-sessions – handshakes and even hugs – who would have believed this possible again just three years ago. The 18th European Microscopical Congress (EMC2028) will be organized by the Spanish Microscopy Society in Barcelona, September 18-22, 2028 – we are all looking forward for the continuation of this important cornerstone in the microscopy scientific world. Klaus Qvortrup EMC2024, Conference Chair