Congratulations to Oren Cohen and his group for winning a consolidator European Research Council
(ERC) grant. The ERC funds high-risk high-gain projects of top research groups.
Oren’s group works on ultrahigh-speed nanometer-scale microscopy. To date, we are very much blind to non-repeatable phenomena with nanometer and picosecond-scales because they are too fast and their details are too small for our imaging technology. As a result, such processes, e.g. femto-magnetism and mode-locking of micro-lasers, are still not well understood. Within the ERC project, the team aims to develop a microscopes for filming movies of non-repeatable phenomena with nanometer-picosecond scales.
The microscope is based on a new concept that the group developed, which is called TIMP – Time-Resolved Imaging by Multiplexed Ptychography (ptychography stands for folded photography). In TIMP, a dynamical object is illuminated by a burst of ultrashort pulses (with THz repetition rate) - each pulse probes the object at a different time. The interaction of each pulse with the object leads to a diffraction pattern on the CCD, yet the CCD is too slow to record the multiple diffraction patterns. Instead, it recods the sum of the diffraction patterns within a single exposure. Finally, the movie is reconstructed algorithmically from the multiplexed recorded data. The group will develop TIMP microscopes using visible and x-ray radiation as well as electrons. Excellent graduate and undergraduate students are welcome to participate in this effort.
We wish Oren and his team good luck with their research.
For the announcement of the prize: https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2018-consolidator-grants-results