Trendswatch 2013: Back to the Future

TrendsWatch 2013 highlights six trends that CFM's staff and advisors believe are highly significant to museums and their communities, based on our scanning and analysis over the past year. For each trend, we provide a brief summary, list examples of how the trend is playing out in the world, comment on the trend's significance to society and to museums specifically, and suggest ways that museums might respond. We also provide links to additional readings. TrendsWatch provides valuable background and context for your museum's planning and implementation

Materials science, instrument knowledge, and the power source renaissance [scanning our past]

This month’s article tracks the progress of power source technoscience through the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond by highlighting how the revolution in materials science helped beget the revolution in power sources technoscience

Three-dimensional scanning of specular and diffuse metallic surfaces using an infrared technique

For the past two decades, the need for three-dimensional (3-D) scanning of industrial objects has increased significantly and many experimental techniques and commercial solutions have been proposed. However, difficulties remain for the acquisition of optically non-cooperative surfaces, such as transparent or specular surfaces. To address highly reflective metallic surfaces, we propose the extension of a technique that was originally dedicated to glass objects. In contrast to conventional active triangulation techniques that measure the reflection of visible radiation, we measure the thermal emission of a surface, which is locally heated by a laser source. Considering the thermophysical properties of metals, we present a simulation model of heat exchanges that are induced by the process, helping to demonstrate its feasibility on specular metallic surfaces and predicting the settings of the system. With our experimental device, we have validated the theoretical modeling and computed some 3-D point clouds from specular surfaces of various geometries. Furthermore, a comparison of our results with those of a conventional system on specular and diffuse parts will highlight that the accuracy of the measurement no longer depends on the roughness of the surface

Scanning probe microscopy with SQUID-on-tip sensor

In this thesis, we present the work developed in the past four years, on the fabrication, improvements and applications of a promising scanning probe technique, based on the SQUID technology. The nanoSQUID sensors improved drastically, but most of them lie on the plane of a large substrate and are therefore complicated to apply as scanning sensors. Although there have been demonstrations of magnetic imaging by scanning samples in proximity to such SQUIDs, the geometry is not amenable to a generally applicable microscopy. The nanoSQUIDs, that we used for our investigations, unlike conventional planar SQUIDs, can have diameters down to 50nm and are positioned on the apex of a sharp tip, hence their name a SQUID-on-tip (SOT)