Gregori Aminoff Prize 2015

Professor Ian Robinson of the London Centre of Nanotechnology has been awarded the 2015 Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography.
 
The prize, conferred since 1979 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – the body that awards the Nobel prizes – recognises a documented, individual contribution in the field of crystallography, including areas concerned with the dynamics of the formation and dissolution of crystal structures. In its citation, the Academy highlighted Professor Robinson’s development of diffraction techniques for the investigation of surfaces and nanomaterials.

Professor Ian Robinson has made a number of pioneering contributions in the field of X-ray diffraction. He is in the forefront when it comes to utilising the opportunities provided by increasingly advanced synchrotron light sources and free-electron lasers in the study of the electronic and structural properties of solids.

During the 1980s, Robinson further developed x-ray diffraction, allowing the study of surfaces. Until that time the standard technique for studying surface structures had been LEED (Low Energy Electron Diffraction), which uses electrons rather than X-rays to create a diffraction pattern. The use of electrons results in great surface sensitivity, whereas X-ray radiation penetrates much further into a material. When the technique of X-ray diffraction could be made sufficiently surface sensitive, it had many advantages. X-ray diffraction can provide more precise results. The ability of X-rays to penetrate further into a material also makes it possible to look inside a reaction cell and study the chemical processes occurring on a catalyst surface in such a cell. Robinson’s development work has been related to both the experimental techniques and the methods used in interpreting the results, and his method is used at a number of the world’s foremost laboratories.

Ian Robinson is also active in the development of new synchrotron radiation-based techniques, which use the high degree of coherence of these light sources, i.e. the fact that the light waves are in phase with each other. Over the last decades, diffraction based methods have been developed that allow detailed three-dimensional mapping of materials – and Robinson is one of the pioneers in this area. He has demonstrated how it is possible to obtain a three-dimensional representation of deformations and defects in nanomaterials. Using the extremely short X-ray pulses from the LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source) free-electron laser at Stanford, Robinson and his colleagues have also shown how one can excite motion (phonons) of the atoms in individual nanoparticles and follow how these movements propagate in the particles.

The prize will be presented at the Annual meeting of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 31 March 2015.

This press release is reprinted from material taken from the The Swedish Academy of Sciences website. The link to the original press release can be found here.

You can view a selection of Professor Ian Robinson’s papers here.