David A Muller

Imaging hydrogen atoms with ptychography

Our microscope lab was in the same buliding as the anechoic chamber - in one of the old varechoic rooms. The acoustics folks showed us how to get things quiet.

Jim West's group taught us everything we know about building ultra-quiet rooms

Two wood ducks paddling together in Cayuga lake as the trees on the opposite shore are just starting to turn

Ducktober

Astro folks might want a turn?

#cryoEM 🧪⚛️ Lena’s paper on imaging thick biological sections with STEM is finally published! We started this work almost 10 years ago. After Lena passed in 2023, I spent much of my sabbatical working with Yue and Steve to wrap this up. Also learned a lot about TEM vs STEM dose efficiency

Some good news 🧪⚛️

Electron ptychography 3D reconstruction of SiC after 100 iterations, taking 1 hour. This is an animated depth section showing the depth slicing through a thin SiC film and its interface with an amorphous layer. A small hole drilled with a parked electron beam is visible in the top half of the image

We had 35 participants at our summer school a few weeks ago testing this on their laptops. Turns out a Macbook M4 pro is almost as fast as a 10GB slice of an A100. From the school, here is a 1-hour reconstruction. (Data took a few seconds to record at the school in a crowded scope room)

Our new zippy ptychography code, PtyRAD is now out in print. 3D Multislice reconstructions that used to take a day, now can be done in about an hour!

🧪⚛️ #ptycho
paper and install links:
academic.oup.com/mam/article/...

Good use case for comic sans

I don't know how many were posters. Overall probably a 10-15% drop. For cancelled invited talks it felt larger, or perhaps it was that my area had a lot of invited talks from China, reflecting the huge investments and activity there on this topic

I’m told we had about 200 cancelled talks due to visa problems or US funding cuts. We were told not to travel, but have travel funds that will vanish if we don’t, so the whole gang was here

Given the location, we know he didn’t simply walk

That earned a follow

Actually the original 3 make sense to watch after Andor. There are no others

Schedule of lectures for the ptychography workshop, from 8-11 July

Our hands-on workshop on Electron #Ptychography ! ⚛️🧪 using our new fast python code starts tomorrow, Tuesday, July 8. Lecture Schedule is below, for folks who want to listen in on-line. We hope to post the tutorial and code walk through videos later.

cornell.zoom.us/j/9512638476...

This is fantastic, do read it.

Canandaigua for ice cream, Watkins Glenn for boat tours

Seneca lake pier at Watkins glen

Canandaiga lake pier at sunset. It has lots of little boat sheds

Took a break and conducted some pier review last week. 12/10

One of my favorite things is seeing how publishers around the world reinterpret covers for foreign language editions of our books. The Alchemy of Us is being published in Korean. A side by side comparison -- same great content, totally different vibe.

Hari starts (multi)slicing the cake decorated with M&Ms laid out in a perovskite lattice

Celebrating Hari’s thesis defense with a NaNbO3-themed cake. It is layered in 3D to match his paper rdcu.be/eiV0u

Keep it as a badge of honor

View over the Cornell golf course at night , looking North, showing one faint band of nitrogen plasma

Very faint aurora in Ithaca

The end of US leadership in science, technology, and innovation.

All in one little table.

A tremendous gift to China, courtesy of the GOP.

nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Danielle was one of Lena’s students 🧪

Hey. I remember you worked for Max. You’re right about the metals fraction of R&D being too high. I’ve worked with Corning for over 20 years

So the crazy thing here is the company this is supposed to be about is Corning. The company famous for its glass research. And the across the board metric is a measure of how similar individual atom positions are in their CRYSTAL structures. So much is nuts here, but that should have been a red flag

Post docs get it the worst. The students have a union, so the university has some incentive to make them whole and not breach their contracts. What I’m seeing a lot of pressure from the various admins to lay off post docs first. And that timeline pretty much precludes future academic options

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune