A Symposium Celebrating 50 Years of The Cowley - Moodie Multislice Theory

Tuesday, 6th November 2007 (Melbourne Cup Day)

50 years ago, John Cowley and Alex Moodie developed a revolutionary theory in physical optics that gave rise to the multislice formalism. Electron microscopy was emerging as a new window for materials science, its probing power arising from the small wavelengths of high energy electrons and their incredibly strong interaction with materials. This posed the monumental problem of how to describe the scattering of electrons in solids canonically and analytically. Without such a description, the full power of electron microscopy could not be realised. The theory presented by Cowley and Moodie in their historical papers of 1957 and ‘58 gave rise to quantitative analysis in both diffraction and imaging. Multislice is now an integral part of many analytical software packages and has found application well beyond electron scattering, in visible light and X-ray optics. The magnitude of this contribution was recognised by the International Union of Crystallography through the awarding of the inaugural Ewald Prize to John Cowley and Alex Moodie in 1987 - the 30th anniversary of their theory.

To celebrate this 50th Anniversary, we invite your participation in a one day research symposium. Contributed papers are welcome in any area related to the multislice theory, including historical reflections, new theoretical developments and applications of multislice to the latest advances in electron, light and X-ray microscopy.