PSu Magazine Winter 2002

I N A new electron microscope will allow scientists to see the world on the atomic scale. By John Kirkland he universe has been described as o vast that it size is unimag– inable. Nothing in the human experi– ence can make sense of a dimension so huge. Take that same concept and tum it inside out, and you begin to enter the world of Jun Jiao, assistant professor of physics. As an astronomer measures distance in light year, Jiao measure her subjects in nanometers (one bil– lionth of a meter) and ang troms (one tenth of a nanometer). Somehow, aying that her area of research deals with objects that are tens of thou ands of time smaller than the diameter of a human hair doesn't really help u to visualize it. It's too small. Suffice it to say that they can only been een with an electron microscope. Fortunately for Jiao and a broad coalition of researchers from engineer– ing, chemistry, geology, biology, and other disciplines, Portland State will 8 PSU MAGAZINE WI TER 2002 K I N G soon have the proper tool to enter this world. In November it ordered a high resolution scanning transmission elec– tron microscope from FE! Company in Hillsboro, which will make Portland State the only educational institution in the Pacific Northwest with this kind of instrument. he microscope will form the backbone for the Center for Nano cience, a group recently founded by these ame researchers to study the super small. The group, spearheaded by Jiao, originally applied to the National cience Foundation for a $1 million grant to purchase the microscope. When they were turned down, the University came forward and agreed to buy it. 'They convinced me that it was desirable for the university because it supported so many faculty in so many discipline , and that it would be essen– tial for scholarly work," says Bill Feyer- A L herm, vice provost for research and graduate tudies. ln Jiao's case, that means carbon nanotubes. iao has been working in this L field for 10 years. The findings of her research have been documented in more than 50 publications, and in 1993 she was selected as a Presidential Scholar of the Microscopy Society of America. Upon coming to PSU in 1999 from the University of Arizona, she established a research laboratory capable of fabricating carbon nan– otubes, nanoparticles, and nanocrys– tals. She's published the re ults of her work in cientific journals and pre– sented them at national and interna– tional conferences. Nanotubes are hollow worms of carbon atoms that form under precise laboratory conditions. They have excited the high-tech community since their discovery in the 1990s