Abstract:  The field of electron microscopy has seen dramatic advances in the past decade, with the development of advanced electron optics such as aberration-correctors and source monochromators, new detector modalities and advances in sample manipulation and probing. In this talk, I will detail activities within the Electron Microscopy Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials, with a specific focus on understanding the structure, composition and performance of heterogeneous catalysts in-situ and in-operando. Specifically, I will describe how environmental transmission electron microscopy can be used to create real time movies of the nucleation, growth and growth termination of carbon nanotubes. Thereafter, I will detail new methods that are being developed to characterize working catalysts in-operando using a closed-cell micro reactor which allows imaging at atmospheric pressure. Finally, I will describe how this same micro reactor allows correlated measurements to be obtained from both electron microscopy and x-ray spectroscopy and diffraction and will present a vision for the integration of this capability into the facilities at the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at BNL.

Biography: Eric Stach leads the Electron Microscopy Group in the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Virginia.  He has held positions as Staff Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Center for Electron Microscopy at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as Associate then Full Professor at Purdue University, where he retains an Adjunct appointment. His research interests focus on the development and application of electron microscopy techniques to solve materials problems in catalysis, nanostructure growth, thin film growth, and materials for energy storage.  He will return to academia in the Fall of 2017 as a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.