David J. Flannigan

David Flannigan is the leading inventor and pioneer of time-resolved, ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM), a technique that is revolutionizing our understanding of the atomic scale structure of materials. One of his important breakthroughs is the direct imaging of lattice phonons (vibrations) in semiconductors. Phonons are responsible for acoustic and thermal energy transport in materials. Flannigan’s UEM allows them to be visualized for the first time, opening up the possibility of directly probing how nanoscopic defects such as dislocations, inclusions, and grain boundaries – which are ubiquitous in real materials – impact the flow of energy.