Carlos Baiz and Sean Roberts Receive NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant

Sean Roberts and Carlos Baiz of UT Austin and James Batteas of Texas A&M University are recipients of a $1 million National Science Foundation grant through the Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI). They plan to build a new microscope that will be part of the UT MRSEC user facility. The microscope is designed to track chemical processes on the natural length and timescales over which they unfold, combining nanometer spatial resolution with femtosecond time resolution. "Building an instrument with these specifications is challenging and commercial instruments of this type just don't exist," Roberts explains. "There are a few instruments like this in a handful of research institutes across the world, but access to them is generally limited to just the researchers who built the instrument. What's unique about our microscope is it's designed as a user instrument that will be incorporated into the UT MRSEC. This will provide access to several users here at UT and across the southwest region.”