Janos Kirz

Janos Kirz ( Hungarian Kirz János ; * 1937 in Budapest ) is a Hungarian-American physicist , professor emeritus at the State University of New York and a pioneer of X-ray microscopy and spectromicroscopy.

Career

János Kirz was born in Budapest in 1937 as the son of the lawyer András Kirz. His uncle was the physicist Edward Teller . Kirz's father was murdered in a concentration camp in 1945. After the war, the surviving members of the family were subjected to reprisals from the new communist rulers. As a result of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Kirz emigrated to the USA.

There he studied from 1957 at the University of California, Berkeley , where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in 1959 . He then worked in the field of high energy physics at the Berkeley Lab in the group of Luis Walter Alvarez , where he used the Bevatron particle accelerator.

After receiving his doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1963, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in France at the Center d'études nucléaires des CEA in Saclay . After this stay he returned to the Berkeley Laboratory, where he devoted himself to meson spectroscopy.

In 1968 he left California and accepted a position at Stony Brook University , where he became a professor in 1973. He continued doing research in particle physics until 1980, performing experiments at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Fermilab .

During a one-year stay in Dorothy Hodgkin's laboratory in Oxford from 1972 to 1973, his interest in X-ray optics and synchrotron radiation was aroused. As a result, he turned to X-ray microscopy , microspectroscopy and holography with X-rays as well as the imaging methods of X-ray diffraction , with the experimental work being carried out on the BNL's NSLS synchrotron radiation source .

He remained connected to the research location Berkeley, where his career began, and spent several months research there in 1993/1994 and a full year in the period 2002-2003.

From 1998 to 2001 he headed the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University and is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the university.

Services

The focus of Kirz's life's work is X-ray microscopy with soft X-rays . The success of the methods and applications developed by Kirz and his colleagues in this area is based on the introduction of zone plates as X-ray lenses in scanning X-ray microscopy, which he promoted. This was made possible, among other things, because Kirz's group in Stony Brook and his partners in Berkeley developed techniques for making efficient, high-resolution zone plates using electron beam lithography . To do this, they worked with researchers from IBM's research division . With the zone plates obtained in this way, Kirz and his group succeeded in putting the first scanning X-ray microscope with a spatial resolution beyond 1 µm into service at the NSLS.

The methods initially developed by Kirz and his working group for soft X-rays in the energy range below 1 keV could subsequently also be used for higher-energy radiation. In addition, Kirz's group and other research teams succeeded in improving the spatial resolution down to the nanometer range. Today, zone plates for scanning microscopes are used for X-ray energies up to the double-digit keV range and achieve resolutions down to orders of magnitude of 10 nm.

Kirz, however, did not limit his work to lens-bound procedures, but was also active in the development of procedures such as Coherent diffraction imaging , which he developed in collaboration with other physicists such as David Sayre , as well as novel methods of XANES spectroscopy.

Over the course of his career, Kirz has written over 200 articles in scientific journals.

Honors, memberships and awards

In 1970 Kirz received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Advanced Light Source in Berkeley and numerous other specialist committees as well as the editorial boards of several specialist journals.

In 2005 he and Günter Schmahl received the Compton Award from the Advanced Photon Source .

Publications (selection)

1. ↑ J. Kirz: Phase Zone Plates for X-Rays and Extreme UV . In: Journal of the Optical Society of America . Vol. 64, No. 3 , 1974, ISSN  0030-3941 , pp. 301-309 , doi : 10.1364 / JOSA.64.000301 (English).
2. ↑ J. Kirz, C. Jacobsen, M. Howells: Soft-X-Ray Microscopes and Their Biological Applications . In: Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics . Vol. 28, No. 1 , February 1995, ISSN  0033-5835 , p. 33-130 (English).
3. ↑ C. Jacobsen, S. Williams, E. Anderson, MT Browne, CJ Buckley, D. Kern, J. Kirz, M. Rivers, X. Zhang: Diffraction-Limited Imaging in a Scanning-Transmission X-Ray Microscope . In: Optics Communications . Vol. 86, No. 3-4 , November 15, 1991, ISSN  0030-4018 , pp. 351-364 , doi : 10.1016 / 0030-4018 (91) 90016-7 (English).
4. ↑ JW Miao, P. Charalambous, J. Kirz, D. Sayre: Extending the methodology of X-ray crystallography to allow imaging of micrometre-sized non-crystalline specimens . In: Nature . Vol. 400, No. 6742 , July 22, 1999, ISSN  0028-0836 , p. 342-344 , doi : 10.1038 / 22498 (English).
5. ↑ D. Shapiro, P. Thibault, T. Beetz, V. Elser, M. Howells, C. Jacobsen, J. Kirz, E. Lima, H. Miao, AM Neiman, D. Sayre: Biological imaging by soft x- ray diffraction microscopy . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . Vol. 102, No. 43 , October 25, 2005, ISSN  0027-8424 , p. 15343–15346 , doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0503305102 (English).
6. ^ H. Ade, X. Zhang, S. Cameron, C. Costello, J. Kirz, S. Williams: Chemical Contrast in X-Ray Microscopy and Spatially Resolved XANES Spectroscopy of Organic Specimens . In: Science . Vol. 258, No. 5084 , November 6, 1992, ISSN  0036-8075 , p. 972–975 , doi : 10.1126 / science.1439809 (English).

Individual evidence

1. ^ István Hargittai : The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century . Oxford University Press , 2006, ISBN 0-19-803967-0 , pp.  10 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
2. ↑ István Hargittai : Judging Edward Teller . 1st edition. Prometheus Books, Amherst (New York) 2010, ISBN 978-1-61614-221-6 , pp.  54-58 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Janos Kirz. (No longer available online.) Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , archived from the original March 4, 2016 ; accessed on February 7, 2017 (English, CV).  
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Curriculum Vitae Janos Kirz. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Stony Brook University , archived from the original on October 1, 2013 ; accessed on February 15, 2016 (English, CV).  
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Schmahl, Kirz Received Compton Award for Contributions to X-ray Microscopy. (No longer available online.) Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory , 2005, archived from the original on January 8, 2017 ; accessed on April 4, 2017 .  
6. ^ Web of Science Search. In: Web of Science . Thomson Reuters , accessed on November 14, 2017 (English, provides 204 specialist articles by J. Kirz, from the period 1961 to 2013, h-index : 45).