image: The Falling Walls Foundation named Saw Wai Hla the Science Breakthrough of the Year winner in the physical sciences category of its prestigious competition among innovators.
Credit: (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)
Saw Wai Hla of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory was selected by the Falling Walls Foundation as the Science Breakthrough of the Year award winner in the physical sciences category.
Given by the Berlin-based, not-for-profit Falling Walls Foundation, the award recognizes innovative scientific advancements and impactful initiatives across various fields. Its name a nod to the 1989 deconstruction of the Berlin Wall and the breaking of barriers both physical and imaginary, the foundation is devoted to bringing together people who aim to tear down the next walls in science and society.
Hla was chosen as the overall winner in the physical sciences category because of his groundbreaking work on the use of X-rays. A physicist at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science user facility, he is a leading researcher in the areas of single atom-molecule manipulation with scanning tunneling microscopy, single-molecule spintronics and molecular machines on surfaces. Hla is also a professor in the physics department at Ohio University.
“If we can use X-rays to detect just one atom for subsequent characterization, it will further revolutionize the application of X-rays to an unprecedented level.” — Saw Wai Hla, Argonne physicist
He has published over 100 articles and has given more than 160 invited talks in 23 countries. He has also served on numerous national and international boards and has been a proposal reviewer and panelist for DOE, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and European funding agencies.
His project, “Breaking the Wall of 128 Years of X-ray History,” was based on research that led to the discovery of a new X-ray capability. This capability could be widely applied in environmental and medical research and in the development of batteries and microelectronic devices.
Discovered in 1895, X-rays have become a ubiquitous part of modern society. They are used everywhere, from medicine and security scanning to characterizing materials and quantum information sciences. However, using X-rays to provide information about material at atomic resolution requires a large sample size.
Reducing the sample quantity needed for X-ray characterization has been a long-standing goal of scientists. However, until recently, they have been unable to analyze samples that contain fewer than 10,000 atoms.
In a paper published last year in Nature, Hla and a team of scientists from Argonne and several universities reported being able to use X-ray light from a beamline shared by Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) and CNM to locate a single atom in a compound. They then used synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy to characterize the elemental type and chemical properties of the atom. The APS is another DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.
Volker Rose, a physicist at the APS, was instrumental in developing the X-ray technique used in this study thanks to a DOE Early Career Research Program award he received in 2012.
“We break this barrier by detecting X-ray signals from just one atom,” Hla said. “If we can use X-rays to detect just one atom for subsequent characterization, it will further revolutionize the application of X-rays to an unprecedented level.”
This year’s Falling Walls global call received more than 1,100 nominations from over 300 different institutions.
In August, Hla was named one of 10 winners in the physical sciences category who would be eligible to receive the ultimate prestigious title in this competition, Science Breakthrough of the Year. This cohort of 10 winners was selected from a previously shortlisted group of 30 finalists in the physical sciences category that included Hla and another Argonne scientist, Giulia Galli.
Galli is a senior scientist at Argonne’s Center for Molecular Engineering and director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials. She is also the Liew Family professor of electronic structure and simulations in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago.
An expert whose research focuses on problems relevant to the development of sustainable energy sources and quantum technologies, Galli was chosen as a finalist for her project, “Breaking the Wall of Quantum Materials.”
Those chosen for the Science Breakthrough of the Year in each category of the competition will be celebrated during the Falling Walls Science Summit, Nov. 7-9, in Berlin. Held annually, this event provides a platform for these innovators to showcase their outstanding achievements and present their work to a global audience of scientists, policymakers and industry leaders.
Hla’s research was funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials
The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.