The Siwick group watches the hidden life of materials

Oct 2014: Ultrafast electron diffraction experiments open a new window on the microscopic world. The Siwick group has succeeded in simultaneously observing the complex reorganizations of both atomic position and electron distribution during the transformation of vanadium dioxide from a semiconductor into a metal, a process that takes place a trillion times faster than the blink of an eye . An article on this work by Vance Morrison et al. was published in Science magazine on Oct. 24.