Every six months, the Materials Research Society celebrates the most eye-catching images found in the course of their researchers' studies -- celebrating the serendipitous convergence of science and art.Materials researchers may struggle for years with stubborn instruments, fragile crystals or difficult chemical reactions before obtaining a bit of precious data from the exotic substances they study. Now, the scrutiny of samples not only yields potentially important data, but also artistic inspiration.
Silicon oxide nanowires have an amusing habit of arranging themselves into impressive patterns. When S.K. Hark, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, looked at some of them under a scanning electron microscope, he saw flowers. Unlike plants, their fertilizers were gallium and gold catalysts -- which allowed them to grow to several microns in length while maintaining a roughly 10-nanometer diameter. The physics professor colorized his award-winning crop to enhance their resemblance to real sunflowers.
At Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, postdoctoral scholar Hui Ying Yang was examining zinc oxide nanoneedles when she saw an image that resembled the mountains as portrayed in classical Chinese paintings. To enhance the resemblance, Yang colorized the scene and added part of the original painting.
At Stanford University, Zhenan Bao and her team of researchers work to make organic transistors for cutting-edge electronic devices. One of her graduate students, Zihong Liu, used a cross-polarized light microscope to examine this array of the tiny switches. For Liu, bright parts of the film look like lakes and mountains, while the gold electrodes appear to be a fence.
Nickel-titanium alloys fascinate scientists with their ability to spring back into a pre-set shape after lots of abuse -- just heat them and they will recover. At the Max Planck Institute for Metallurgy in Stuttgart, Germany, Blythe Gore Clark used a focused ion beam to form this micropillar and then a nanoindenter to compress it. Her transmissio-electron-microscope image shows the effects of strain on the tiny metal rod.
Looking like a tumor or the cross-section of a brain, this image of a polymer was created by Muruganathan Ramanathan at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. A postdoctoral scholar, Ramanathan made an ultrathin film of the beautiful substance, patterned it with oxygen-reactive-ion etching and used heat and solvents to make it more crystalline. The result looks more like modern art than the results of a wry scientific study.
When Geoff Brennecka, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory, inserted a tantalum oxide crystal into his scanning electron microscope and started gathering images, he realized the machine had not been cleaned properly. Lucky for him, some tiny polystyrene beads left over from the preceding experiment stuck to the side of his sample in an incredible pattern. It looked like a man running toward the edge of a cliff.
Brennecka saw its artistic potential, colorized the image and then submitted it to the Materials Research Society Spring 2008 Science as Art Competition, where it won second place.
This image of a nearly flawless gold crystal was captured by Violeta Navarro at the University of Madrid with an atomic-force microscope. These microscopes produce some of the most vivid images of tiny objects in the world by running an extremely small cantilever back and forth over their surfaces. Then, laser interferometers pick up slight movements of the cantilever as it passes over atom-sized bumps.
After depositing some potassium niobium oxide onto a silicon surface, graduate student Michael Sygnatowicz used an optical microscope to take this photograph, resembling a distant galaxy.
Although it looks like a stained-glass window, this image shows the magnetic domains of a thin iron film sitting atop a crystal made from magnesium and gallium arsenate. Souliman el Moussaoui, a researcher at the ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Italy, used X-ray magnetic circular dichroism with photoelectron-emission microscopy to create the striking picture. If you didn't pass out trying to read that, a simpler explanation is that el Moussaoui shot the sample with two oppositely polarized beams of powerful X-rays -- and then subtracted the data points in one file from the other.
It may be a scanning-electron-microscope image of polymers covering a porous silicon mold, but to researcher Fatih Buyukserin at the University of Texas, it looked like a forest bordering the Hudson River.
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