The winners of this year’s WITec Paper Awards have been announced. Research groups from Poland, Switzerland and Singapore won the Paper Awards in gold, silver and bronze, respectively. The annual awards honor outstanding scientific publications that feature results acquired with a WITec instrument. Scientists from all over the world submitted more than 80 publications, from between January and December 2014, to this year’s competition. A jury chose the three winning papers from among the submissions. Selection criteria included the impact of the scientific results and the originality of the applied techniques.
The gold Paper Award goes to Katarzyna Marzec for her work on heme oxidation in red blood cells (erythrocytes). Hemes are the oxygen binding components of hemoglobin, the red pigment in blood. In their paper “High resolution Raman imaging reveals spatial location of heme oxidation sites in single red blood cells of dried smears” Marzec and colleagues from the group of Malgorzata Baranska at the Jagiellonian Centre for Experimental Therapeutics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland documented for the first time the spatial distribution of Fe2+/Fe3+ hemes inside single erythrocytes combining various microscopic techniques such as confocal Raman imaging, atomic force microscopy, and scanning near-field optical microscopy. This work convinced WITec’s jury by illustrating the beneficial application of confocal Raman imaging combined with AFM for research in life science.
The WITec Paper Award in silver is presented to Martin Süess from the ETH in Zurich (Switzerland). Süess from the group of Ralph Spolenak together with other Swiss and French colleagues analyzed strain in complex three-dimensional nanobridges. The paper “Power-dependent Raman analysis of highly strained Si nanobridges” describes how a combination of micro-Raman spectroscopy and finite element analysis is used to develop a better understanding of strain on silicon nanobridges.
The bronze WITec Paper Award winners are researchers from the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore. Chunxiao Cong and Ting Yu published a study on folded graphene: “Enhanced ultra-low-frequency interlayer shear modes in folded graphene layers”. Through comprehensive Raman imaging studies the scientists analyzed shear modes in few-layer graphene that due to their extremely weak signal are very difficult to detect.
WITec recently announced the WITec Paper Award 2016 for research published in 2015. Scientists from all fields of application in both academia and industry are invited to submit their publications featuring results acquired with a WITec instrument to papers@witec.de.