Argonne’s Zaluzec Becomes Microanalysis Society Fellow

Nestor J. Zaluzec, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has been named an inaugural fellow in the Legends Class of the Microanalysis Society, an award that recognizes his contributions to advanced microscopy and microanalysis.

Over the course of his ongoing career at Argonne, Zaluzec has pioneered advanced techniques and instrumentation for state-of-the-art electron microscopy. The Microanalysis Society recognized Zaluzec for his outstanding leadership and sustained contributions to advanced analytical electron microscopy, including development of scanning confocal electron microscopy and his work on combining spectrometry with electron diffraction.

“In order to understand and actually move forward in today’s technologically demanding society, what we have to do is more than simply look at a material’s structure; rather, we have to fully characterize it,” Zaluzec said. “We have to understand the relationship between morphology; crystallography; and elemental, chemical, and electronic structure, and we have to integrate this information so that we can unravel the synergistic relationship of a material’s macroscopic properties to its atomic structure.”

The future of microanalysis, he said, lies in what scientists refer to as “multimodal and multidimensional” techniques, as well as new and novel detectors — which can be combined in different ways to study a material. At Argonne, combining x-ray microscopy, optical microscopy, and electron microscopy provides one example of this approach. Through this combination, Argonne enables scientists to capture a comprehensive range of information about the constituent phases and individual atoms within a sample.

“In the 1960s, we were working on the basics, operating at the μm scale — we were merely dreaming of the ability to achieve single-atom resolution,” Zaluzec said. “Now, we have the capability to not only resolve but also analyze materials at the picometer scale, and the view we have today at the atomic scale is fascinating. One analytical technique or one analytical instrument is no longer enough to answer all of today’s questions. We need correlative approaches that integrate and amalgamate our experimental studies in order to unravel and comprehend the complex interactions found in modern systems.”

The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state, and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems and advance U.S. scientific leadership.