$300,000 science grant will benefit summer research students

Brett Barwick, associate professor of physics and the Harrison E. Farnsworth 1918 Chair in Physics, has received a $300,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation that will provide equipment and monies for several summer research students.

“Over the last decade, a new research field has developed by combining electron microscopy with ultrafast lasers,” Barwick wrote in his proposal. “Now ‘ultrafast electron microscopes’ can be used to make movies of nanoscale (microscopic) processes that occur too quickly to observe with standard electron microscopes.”

He said the project will study fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena, and angular momentum from light to electrons. This team will also explore how light can be used to compress electron pulses in time from picoseconds to tens of femptoseconds, and to shape the spatial properties of electron beams.

The experiments also will advance the technical capabilities of electron microscopes and have an impact on imaging and quantum control techniques that are needed for physics, chemistry and biology, Barwick said.