Welcome to a seminar in the “Material Matters” series. This time, we are pleased to host Marianne Liebi, Group Leader at PSI in Villigen and Assistant Professor at EPFL in Lausanne. Her talk is titled: “Imaging Orientations Across Length Scales: Multi-Modal Tensor Tomography.”
Overview
- Date:Starts 10 June 2025, 15:00Ends 10 June 2025, 16:00
- Location:Kollektorn, MC2-huset. Ingång från Kemivägen 9.
- Language:English
Abstract
Structure and ordering of materials typical span many length scales, from the atomic arrangement to nanoscopic building blocks and microstructure up to the macroscopic material.
Investigating the structure can be done by direct visualization at each length scale, or by probing their arrangement indirectly with their interactions of photons resulting in scattering, diffraction or change in polarization state. Orientation of crystalline materials (also referred to as texture) can be probed using anisotropic X-ray or electron diffraction, alignment of nanostructure can be probed with anisotropic small-angle X-ray scattering or anisotropic refraction of visible light, i.e. birefringence.
To resolve this orientation information in 3D we have developed different tensor tomography algorithms. I will demonstrate how we can use these methods to unravel complex biological tissues such as the twist of the Narwhal tusk but also how they can be used to resolve texture in very small or deformed crystals relevant both in biominerals but also metals.
About the speaker
Marianne Liebi is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPF Lausanne and head of the group “Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials” at PSI. She has been appointed in 2021 at EPFL where she is part of the Institute of Materials within the School of Engineering.
Marianne Liebi studied Food Science at ETH Zurich where she also obtained her PhD in 2013 in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering lead by Prof. Erich J. Windhab.
Within this project started using small-angle neutron scattering at PSI for the characterization of soft-matter, namely of magnetic alignable self-assembly structures.
As a Postdoc in the coherent X-ray scattering group at the Swiss Light Source she worked from 2013-2016 on method development in SAXS tensor tomography.
In 2016 she moved to Sweden where after a short period at the NanoMAX beamline, MAXIV Laboratory, Lund she started her own research group in 2017 as Assistant Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, and became Docent in Physics in spring 2020. She kept her affiliation at Chalmers University of Technology, where still part of her group is located (Liebi research group) when moving back to Switzerland in 2020 where she was Scientific Group Leader in the Center for X-ray Analytics at Empa, St.Gallen, before joining PSI in November 2021.
(Source: PSI Center for Photon Science Laboratory for Condensed Matter About the Lab Organisation)
