LSU Student Fox Foley Captures Fantastically Small Images at Oak Ridge National Lab

Fox Foley, a PhD student in the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy, recently received the KC Donnelly Externship Award to do research at the Center for Nanoscale Materials Science at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Foley works to understand the atomic details of environmentally persistent free radicals, or EPFRs, a key focus of the LSU Superfund Research Program, which works to protect people and the environment from dangerous air pollution. In particular, Foley studies how EPFRs are formed and persist, a process that involves chemisorption, where individual phenol molecules bond to solid surfaces. To see how this happens, Fox uses scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM, experiments.

At Oak Ridge, Foley has been working closely with senior research staff scientist Art Baddorf. Together, they’ve successfully captured images of rows of Ti atoms on a clean TiO₂ (110) single-crystal surface.

But what’s the deal with all of that aluminum foil?

“To help keep vacuum, we sometimes bake the chamber to remove any water or organics that may be keeping the pressure in the chamber higher than desired. The foil helps distribute the heat as evenly as possible,” Foley said. “We heat to around 120C since water boils at 100C, and the room gets quite toasty. We usually start on a Friday so it can bake over the weekend when nobody is in.”

Using scanning tunneling microscopy, Foley was able to capture images of single Ti atoms on titania. Arranged in rows, the atoms make up the diagonal pattern in the image. The complete picture is fantastically small—less than one thousandth of the diameter of a human hair.

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