Materials Colloquium 2023, April 5th

In-person in HCI J4:


Better than meat with material science

Patrick Rühs (Planted Foods AG)

Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production and is associated with detrimental health effects and ethical issues. Despite these pressing challenges, current meat analogues are not able to replace more than 2.5% of meat consumption due to a lack of texture, taste, and juiciness in plant-based meat. The core challenge in the industry is to effectively replicate plant-based meat products that are as good as meat or even better. Our sustainable and proprietary biostructuring technology developed at Planted allows to create meat that rivals the texture, juiciness, flavor, and aroma of animal-based meat by using a bioprocess that is efficient, ready to scale, and free of additives.


Spectroscopic electron microscopy in two and three dimensions

Georg Haberfehlner (Austrian Centre for Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis)

Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDXS) in the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) are powerful methods for elemental mapping at the nano- and atomic scale. In addition, EELS also provides information about chemical bonding or about optical materials properties. Usually, a TEM only gives projected 2D information about a sample, but by acquisition and reconstruction of a tomographic tilt series STEM imaging and spectroscopy can be extended to the third spatial dimension.
In this presentation, I will introduce the principles of spectroscopic STEM imaging for accessing elemental information, but also for the excitation and imaging of surface polariton fields stemming from either plasmons or optical phonons. I will show examples of surface plasmon imaging on different plasmonic materials and devices, ranging from single metallic nanoparticles to more complex multimaterial assemblies. Finally, I will discuss the combination of spectroscopy and tomography for accessing elemental composition in three dimensions, as well as for reconstruction the electromagnetic properties of surface polariton fields.