The Center's Science for Art Fall 2018 Speaker Series welcomes Dr. Alessandra Satta on December 5th for her talk "Towards Modelling the Degradation of Pigments: Cd-Yellow as a Case Study"
Join us for a lecture and discussion on the application of computational physics techniques to the study of materials significant in the field of Cultural Heritage: solid compounds constituting the colored pigments in the paintings of the European Impressionist and Modernist period. Several of the historical colored pigments from the late 1800 and early 1900 are undergoing an irreversible degradation process. In the specific case of the brilliant yellow pigment that takes its colouration from cadmium sulfide (CdS), a II-VI wide-gap semiconducting compound, the role of structural defects is the subject of a still on-going research that aims to link the history of the material to the reactivity of the pigment surface.
Dr. Alessandra Satta is a research staff member at the Istituto Officina dei Materiali in the Italian National Council of Research (CNR-IOM Cagliari), and a visiting professor in the Department of Physics at the University of North Texas.
Talk Details:
Wednesday, December 5th, 12-1pm
Cook Hall– Rm 2058
MSE Conference Room
2220 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL, 60208
Full Abstract:
Towards modelling the degradation of pigments: Cd-yellow as a case study
Alessandra Satta, Istituto Officina dei Materiali in the Italian National Council of Research (CNR-IOM Cagliari)
Several of the historical coloured pigments belonging to the paintings of the late 1800 and early 1900, are undergoing an irreversible degradation process, causes of which are still unclear. In the specific case of the brilliant yellow pigment that takes its colouration from cadmium sulfide (CdS), a II-VI wide-gap semiconducting compound, the role of structural defects is the subject of a still on-going research that aims to link the history of the material to the reactivity of the pigment surface.
The key idea is based on the fact that different types of structural defects in the surface of the pigment – whose concentration depend on the history of the pigment itself - influence the surface reactivity in different ways, facilitating the formation of different secondary compounds experimentally observed. This fact might be considered as a precursor of the photo-oxidation reactions invoked by experimental results.
The aforementioned study is carried out by means of a fully theoretical approach based on the density functional theory. As opposite to novel materials, in the field of Cultural Heritage where pigments already possess their long history, a theoretical method becomes secondary to the experimental analysis but still it represents a very good complementary tool extremely useful in the interpretation of complex mechanisms not easily accessible by experiments. The interdisciplinary work takes advantage of various chemical and physical skills, both experimental and theoretical.
About Dr. Satta:
Alessandra Satta obtained both a degree (Summa cum Laude) and a PhD in Physics (1996) at the University of Cagliari, Italy. She continued her scientific activity with a short internship at the Institute of Numerical Research in Materials Physics (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 1991) studying the theoretical-computational study of both metallic and semiconducting systems containing point and/or extended defects.
She received post-doctoral appointments at the Atomic Energy Commission in Paris/Saclay (CEA/Saclay, France 1996-1998), the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari (1998-2000), the National Institute of Physics of Matter, unit of Cagliari (2000-2002 and 2004-2009), the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of the CNR, Bologna (2003-2004), and was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship that allowed her to start working on calcite/environment interface at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Princeton, USA (2008).
Dr. Satta has been an Adjunct Professor of General Physics I for the University of Cagliari at the Department of Geoengineering and Environmental Technologies from 2003-2008 and taught Fundamentals of Computer Science at the Department of Physics (2010-12). She has taught electronic structure in solid state physics from 2013-14 in training courses for high school teachers, served as a PhD thesis supervisor and co-supervisor of graduating theses at the University of Cagliari, and authored of a series of publications in international peer-review journals and speaker at national and international conferences.
From 2010 to March 2018, she has been in charge of the Cagliari unit of the CNR-IOM.
Dr. Satta has been a Visiting Scientist at the Department of Physics of the University of North Texas, USA (February-March 2018 and October-December 2018) to apply new theoretical functionals developed by the hosting group, to the study of semiconducting pigments.