Our recent paper using azimuthal-scanning phase-resolved SFG microscopy to investigate the effect of phosphatidylserine (PS) lipid exposure on the membrane packing structure was presented at the recent Faraday Discussion on ‘Structural and Functional Asymmetry of Plasma Membranes’. Overall there were many exciting papers presented at the conference and we were pleased to engage in deep discussions with our colleagues on our work. Thanks to the organisers for putting on an excellent event! You can find the link to our paper here.

We have a new archive paper based on our recent work on imaging CVD-grown hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) monolayers with phonon-enhanced SFG microscopy. In this work we showcase the potential of SFG microscopy for imaging these otherwise optically elusive monolayers and, using rotational-dependent measurements, fully characterise their crystallographic structures. You can read more here.
As this work was a huge collaborative effort spanning several others from the FHI, particularly the Paarmann and Thämer groups, as well as colleagues from FU Berlin and Vanderbilt University in the US, I would like to thank all of the coauthors for their work in making this possible.

Martin Thämer and I organised and hosted a joint Surface Science and Biophysics Focus Session on “Chemical Imaging for the Elucidation of Molecular Structure” at the DPG Spring-Meeting in Regensburg. I was pleased to see an incredibly broad range of imaging techniques being showcased and some very interesting presentations.

Martin Thämer and I attended the annual Bunsen-Tagung meeting in Leipzig, presenting our work on the structure at the air-water interface as well as using SFG microscopy to characterise the heterogeneous structure in thin molecular films.

Recent work on using SFG microscopy to probe lipid packing structures in model membranes, as well as SFG-DFG to probe the water structure in contact with model charged membrane interfaces, was presented at the Biophysical Winter Seminar in Klosters, CH. It was great to meet new people and we had many riveting scientific discussions.