Trinity Dphil student is an Outstanding Emerging Scientist

Trinity Materials Science postgraduate Martin Meier has been awarded the E.W. Mueller Outstanding Emerging Scientist medal at the  APT&M 2022 Conference.

The medal is the most prestigious award of the International Field Emission Society (IFES) and recognises an emerging scientist for a recent and original work in the area of field emission, field ionisation, or related phenomena.

Martin won the prize for his work titled "Using Advanced Database Analysis Techniques to Guide New Experimental Approaches and Gain New Insights into Hydrogen Behaviour in Atom Probe Tomography Data”. His research is concerned with enabling the imaging of hydrogen by means of pulsed-laser atom probe tomography (APT), which is a microscopy technique which can image chemical composition of materials at very high (atomic-scale) resolutions and in 3D.

As part of this work, he implemented large data analysis of hundreds of past APT experiments - the first application of such a procedure in the field. Based on insights gained from these analyses, he designed new experiments to reveal that the ubiquitous contaminant signal in the experiment can be altered in order to enable unambiguous identification of hydrogen atoms constituent within the sample. This resolves a longstanding problem in the field of APT in the analysis of tungsten, and for the first time enables laser-mode APT for atomically resolved 3D imaging of hydrogen.

Martin says of the award: ‘I am very pleased to receive this award for my work, and would like to thank my supervisors and the APT group for all their support. Hydrogen imaging is quite a hot topic at the moment, mostly as part of research into fusion power and use of hydrogen for storage and transportation of energy. My project and research interest is focussed on fusion energy, where implantation of hydrogen isotopes into reactors walls and subsequent material degradation is one of the main materials challenges that needs to be overcome.’