Many congratulations to Martin Meier, who was awarded the E.W. Mueller Outstanding Emerging Scientist medal at the APT&M 2022 Conference, for his work using Atom Probe Tomography, a Royce-supported facility at the University of Oxford.
This medal is the most prestigious award of the International Field Emission Society (IFES) and recognises an emerging scientist for recent and original work in the area of field emission, field ionisation or related phenomena. The prize is highly competitive and the winner is selected in a process of multiple states, involving the submission of a scientific paper, a presentation of the scientific work at the conference, and subsequent questioning by an award panel.
Martin won the prize for his work, titled ‘Using advanced database analysis techniques to guide new experimental approaches and gain new insights into hydrogen behaviour in Atom Probe Tomography data‘.
His research is concerned with enabling the imaging of hydrogen by means of pulsed-layer Atom Probe Tomography, To this end, Martin implemented large data analysis of hundreds of past APT experiments – the first application of such a procedure in the field.
Based on insights gained from these analyses, he designed new experiments to reveal the ubiquitous contaminant signal in the experiment can be altered in order to enable unambiguous identification of hydrogen atoms consistent within the sample. This resolves the longstanding problem in the field of APT in the analysis of tungsten, and for the first time enables laser-mode APT for atomically resolved 3D imaging of hydrogen.
