The National Science Foundation has awarded $431,200 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Physics to facilitate the purchase of a new highly-specialized imaging system - the first of its kind in Alabama - that will be a centerpiece of a new interdisciplinary research laboratory on campus.
Project directors, including physicists Andrei Stanishevsky, Ph.D., and Yogesh Vohra, Ph.D., plan to acquire an X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy System (XPS) with micro-scale-imaging capabilities and develop a new materials-characterization facility in the UAB Center for Nanoscale Materials and Biointegration using the equipment.
"The UAB acquisition of imaging XPS will create a unique experimental facility that should have many positive implications for advancing research in many disciplines, from physics and chemistry to biomedical engineering and materials science," Vohra said.
XPS is a chemical-analysis technique used to determine the composition of very thin layers of solid materials. Imaging XPS also can map the variations in surface chemical composition with a micrometer resolution. This gives researchers the ability to understand the properties and bonding capabilities of newly designed materials that could be used improve the performance of health-care devices, among other uses.