Dr. Eng. Karolina Kosowska, CIRI beamline scientist is a laureate of the Sonatina 7 competition organized by the National Science Centre. The scientist will carry out a research project entitled "Investigation of the influence of modifiers on the crystallization process of thermoplastic polymers: polarized IR microscopy below the diffraction limit".The value of co-financing amounted to: PLN 896,583.

Sonatina 7 is a competition for young researchers. Applications may be submitted by researchers, who have been granted their PhD degree  (between 1 January 2020 and 30 June 2023). Employment under a full-time employment contract must be planned for the principal investigator in the host institution for the project other than the one from which the principal investigator has earned a PhD degree. The principal investigator must complete a foreign fellowship of 3 to 6 months in a foreign research institution. A research project can be planned for a period of either 24 or 36 months.

185 applications were submitted in the competition for a total amount of almost PLN 150 million.  NCN experts qualified only 38 of them for funding for a total amount of over PLN 32 million.

Dr Eng. Karolina Kosowska, will conduct research on the influence of modifiers on the crystallization process of thermoplastic polymers. Since the synthesis of the first polymers, synthetic materials have been constantly improved in terms of their mechanical and functional properties, strength, and resistance to weather conditions. Today, plastics are used in most industries. Just look around you to find at least a dozen examples. The properties of materials, including their mechanical and thermal strength, and transparency depend on the morphology, degree of crystallization, and structure organization.

Full information about the structure of the material at the molecular level requires tracking chemical and structural changes simultaneously. Both types of information are provided by FT-IR microscopy (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) with linearly polarized light. If the material has a highly oriented structure, the use of polarized radiation provides information about the organization of molecules.

The method of four angles of polarization (4P) was first used in practice in 2021 by the CIRI line team for 3D visualization of the arrangement of polymer chains in a sample after the crystallization process [1].

The purpose of my project is implement the 4P-3D method for tracking changes in the molecular structure that occur during the crystallization of polymeric materials, which will allow the creation of a completely new tool that provides at the same time an extremely wide spectrum of information with nanometric spectral resolution. One such method is AFM-IR microscopy. The technique allows the detection of IR (Infrared) radiation obtained as a result of the laser-induced local photothermal expansion of the sample. Spatial resolution can be as low as 30 nm. So far, the 4P-3D method has not been used in AFM-IR, which is one of the goals of our project – says Dr. Eng. Karolina Kosowska, CIRI beamline scientist.

Bibliography:

P. Koziol, K. Kosowska, D. Liberda, F. Borondics, T. P. Wrobel, Super-Resolved 3D Mapping of Molecular Orientation Using Vibrational Techniques, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2022, 144, 3, 14278–14287