Seminar will focus on nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy of energy materials Steve Smith, an expert on nanophotonics, will also deliver a technical seminar on Nanoscale Imaging and Spectroscopy of Energy Materials. This talk will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday, June 12, in 211 Witmer Hall. Dr. Smith is an associate professor of physics, director of the Nanoscience and Engineering doctoral program at the South Dakota School of Mines, and associate research professor of physics at the Colorado School of Mines. He spent 10 years at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where he was a senior scientist in the scanning probe microscopy laboratory and the solid state spectroscopy group. Smith obtained his Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan in 1996, where he worked in the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. His research focuses on the combination of energy and time-resolved spectroscopy with optical microscopy to characterize nanomaterials. The abstract of his seminar is: Optical spectroscopy, combined with high-resolution microscopy methods, is a versatile probe of the electronic, photonic and chemical properties of materials, and may reveal how these properties vary with material and device micro- or nano-structure. The combination of spatial and spectral resolution is also useful to remove ambiguity in the interpretation of spectra due to inhomogeneous broadening. The development and application of such methods, directed at the characterization of materials for energy conversion and storage, is the focus of the research taking place in our lab. Smith will describe the application of near-field spectroscopy to understand the influence of microstructure on the solar cell materials CdTe and GaInP, the use of pump-probe methods to assess the efficacy of quantum dot super-lattice solar cells, and spectroscopy of single lanthanide-doped nanoparticles being developed as upconverting phosphors for solar cells. With time, he will also discuss the development of atomic force, fluorescence and nonlinear optical microscopy methods for imaging the plant cell wall, as part of a multi-university project aimed at understanding the molecular basis of enzymatic degradation of biomass for alternative fuels. -- Juana Moreno, Assistant Professor, Physics, juana.moreno@und.edu, 701-777-3517