LION Image Award goes to Escher-style graphene image
'Electronic Escher', a colorful and psychedelic image of the electronical structure of graphene, is the winner of the LION Image Award 2019. Congratulations, Vera Janssen and Tobias de Jong!
'Our microscope is called Escher, and we were inspired by him for making this image', said a visibly emotional Tobias de Jong while receiving the award. He and Vera Janssen win 100 euros, eternal fame and a printed version of their winning physics image.
Their combination of physics ant arts worked fine. The six member jury, consisting of a team of secretaries of the LION physics institute, voted the image toward a near unanymous number 1 position.
A Low Energy Electron Microscope (LEEM) fires electrons at a layer of graphene, using varying energies and angles. The electrons that come bouncing back, are imaged here.
Superconducting Sausage
The hexagonal graphene structure is infinite, but Janssen and De Jong chose to capture this infinity within the hyperbolical projection that Dutch graphical master M.C Escher used in a series of woodcuts, called 'Circle Limit'.
The other eleven submissions had a high quality. There was the exploded microlens by Enrico Biancalani, reminding of a grinning fairytale character.
There was the daringly colored dickpic 'Superconducting Sausage' by Remko Fermin, a clump of microscopic superconductor that evoked images of a certain male body part.
Nickel Worm
And there was the amazingly detailed Nickel Worm by Jean Paul van Soest, the crashed nickel tip of a scanning miscroscope, that still has graphene flakes hanging on it.
The local newspaper Leidsch Dagblad fell for another image by Tobias de Jong, another image of graphene, resembling an extremely detailed map in red and yellow.
All submissions
All sumbissions are available in high resolution, including an explanation Copyright: LION and the authors).
