Past, present and future of (S)TEM and its applications

A special, open access, issue of EPJ-AP, in honour of Christian Colliex, has been published.
Find it here!

Presentations slides and conference photos are now available on the web site. To be able to see the photos please log in.

You can download a pdf version of the booklet here. Come back on the web site: soon available some speaker's presentations as well as conference photos.

This conference in honour of Christian Colliex will feature eminent speakers from diverse backgrounds who will present the historical developments and the challenges for the future across the many domains to which Christian has contributed:

• Spatially-resolved electron energy-loss spectroscopy
• Instrumental developments in electron and ion microscopy
• Elastic and inelastic coherence
• Biological applications
• Interface physics
• Nanotubes
• Clusters

The conference will be held in Paris at the CNRS headquarters from June 9^th to June 11^th 2010. The number of participants will be limited to 150 people. All the oral contributions will be invited. To encourage open communication, poster sessions will be organised.

Christian Colliex is one of the true pioneers of the (S)TEM and EELS techniques in electron microscopy. Starting in the 1960s, when these methods were little more than laboratory curiosities, he has been a constant driving force, pushing them to the forefront in the world of micro- and nano-analytical science. This meeting will be a celebration of his contribution to the field and will include presentations by many of the other principal actors in the history of these techniques, including those with whom Christian has closely collaborated down the years.

New advances in instrumentation, analysis and interpretation continue to excite and fascinate Christian, and at this meeting all the latest developments and their applications will be described in detail by the people who have brought them into being. In particular, the major improvements in resolution, both spatial (in the last few years) and in spectroscopy (being implemented now) offer possibilities and indeed challenges that were off the radar only a few years ago. In addition, the exciting progress in some related techniques to which Christian has also made a significant contribution will be presented by their leading exponents.

This in turn leads to the future of (S)TEM, its ever-increasing role in the characterisation of the materials of tomorrow, its ever-widening domain of applications (of which biology is becoming a major part) and its ever-deepening contribution to the fundamental understanding of the electronic structure of matter. These will all be fully explored as, together with Christian, we try to envisage the experiments and projects that will thrust these techniques even further into the vanguard of the nano-analytical domain in the decades to come.

The conference is sponsored by the french Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the french Microscopy Society (Sfµ) and the european I3 network ESTEEM. If you want to support this conference, we are still looking for sponsors. Please contact us.