Millennium Café

Recent electron microscopy instrumentation advances have aimed to push the resolution limit, leading to remarkable instruments capable of imaging at 0.5 Å.  But, when imaging soft materials, the resolution is often limited by the amount of dose the material can handle rather than the instrumental resolution.  Despite the challenges of working with radiation sensitive samples, recent developments in electron microscopy have the potential to transform polymer electron microscopy.  For example, monochromatated sources enable spectroscopy and imaging based on the valence electronic structure, aberration correctors enable imaging of thick films, direct electron detectors minimize the required dose for imaging, and differential phase contrast imaging can map heterogeneities in electric fields within films.

Geological systems such as subsurface reservoirs or aquifers often exhibit complex patterns of spatial heterogeneity in the form of channels, natural fractures, and other features. The presence of these multi-scale features strongly influences the performance of processes such as gas-injection and groundwater flow. In this talk, a unique pattern growth algorithm for modeling the complex connectivity of such subsurface systems and a strategy for calibrating the models using injection data will be presented.

Sanjay Srinivasan | Energy and Mineral Engineering

On May 22^th 44 students competed in the Millennium Café Pitch Competition sponsored by PPG.  The competition was fierce as students had <2 minutes to introduce their research in a manner that was understandable and inspiring to our panel of judges.  Don’t miss this opportunity to hear four of the top-5 winners from this year’s competition.

Joseph Persichetti, Alexis Baxter, Kayla Gentile, Ambika Somasundar

The occurrence of workplace accidents is described within the context of self-organized criticality, a theory from statistical physics that governs a wide range of phenomena across physics, biology, geosciences, economics, and the social sciences.  Workplace accident data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal a power-law relationship between the number of accidents and their severity as measured by the number of days lost from work.  This power-law scaling is indicative of workplace accidents being governed by self-organized criticality, suggesting that nearly all workplace accidents have a common underlying cause, independent of their severity.

Come learn about what is happening and how you can join water related research, education, and outreach efforts at Penn State.

Crystalline oxide and chalcogenide thin films offer functionalities beyond their bulk counterparts. Growing these thin films is not always straight forward and defects frequently mask the properties of interest. In this talk I will highlight selected examples where molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has enabled the growth of new thin films with unique functionality.

Roman Engel-Herbert | Materials Science & Engineering