The winner of the WITec Paper Award 2011 has been announced. This year the award goes to Diedrich A. Schmidt, North Carolina A&T State University, USA, Taisuke Ohta and Thomas E. Beechem both from the Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA for their paper: “Strain and charge carrier coupling in epitaxial graphene”, Phys. Rev. B 84, 235422 (2011). The paper was submitted by Prof. Diedrich Schmidt who will additionally receive a 500 Euro Amazon Gift card. Diedrich A. Schmidt most recently took a position as an Assistant Professor of Nanophysics at the North Carolina A&T State University and was formerly a member of the Physical Chemistry Department at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (Prof. Havenith-Newen) where he did parts of the work presented in the paper. Each year the WITec Paper Award honors the best peer-reviewed scientific paper including results and images acquired with a WITec microscope system. A WITec panel has evaluated the submitted papers in terms of scientific relevance, data quality, and the level of instrument-feature utilization.

In total 47 authors participated in the WITec Paper Award 2011 competition. Due to the very high number of advanced papers submitted to WITec, the jury made the decision to honorably mention three other exceptional papers. The following papers have been selected to receive an Honorable Mention:

“Confocal Raman microscope mapping as a tool to describe different mineral and organic phases at high spatial resolution within marine biogenic carbonates: case study on Nerita undata (Gastropoda, Neritopsina)”; G. Nehrke, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany and J. Nouet, University Paris Sud, France. (Biogeosciences, 8, 3761-3769, 2011)

“Thermal Dynamics of Graphene Edges Investigated by Polarized Raman Spectroscopy” Ya Nan Xu, Da Zhan, Lei Liu, Hui Suo, Zhen Hua Ni, Thuong Thuong Nguyen, Chun Zhao, and Ze Xiang Shen, (ACS Nano, 2011, 5 (1), pp 147–152) The paper was submitted by Ya Nan Xu from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

“Hyperspectral Nanoscale Imaging on Dielectric Substrates with Coaxial Optical Antenna Scan Probes”, Alexander Weber-Bargioni, Adam Schwartzberg, Matteo Cornaglia, Ariel Ismach, Jeffrey J. Urban, YuanJie Pang, Reuven Gordon, Jeffrey Bokor, Miquel B. Salmeron, D. Frank Ogletree, Paul Ashby, Stefano Cabrini, and P. James Schuck (Nano Lett., 2011, 11 (3), 1201–1207). The paper was submitted by Alexander Weber-Bargioni from Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA.

As a prize for the Honorable Mention each submitting author will receive the Springer “Confocal Raman Microscopy” book, edited by WITec scientists.

In 2012 WITec will again award the best scientific paper including results and images acquired with a WITec microscope system. Submissions can be sent to papers@witec.de for consideration in the award.