Nanometer scale induced structure between amorphous layers and crystalline materials
US-NSF (00-18) # 1109644; EU: NANOAM GROW-2000 (GROW-200005,1)
MIT is one of the world's most recognized universities. Education and research with relevance to the practical world as a guiding principle continue to be its primary purpose. MIT is independent, coeducational, and privately endowed. It is organized into five schools that contain 21 academic departments, as well as many interdepartmental programs, laboratories, and centers whose work extends beyond traditional departmental boundaries. MIT is one of the leading research universities in the country. In 1998-99, approximately 2,568 researchers worked with faculty and students on projects funded by government, foundations, and industry. MIT employs 2,401 research assistants and 706 teaching assistants. A recent study concluded that university inventions add more than $20 billion and 150,000 jobs to the U.S. economy every year. MIT routinely leads all U.S. universities in patents granted and last year signed 68 license agreements with private companies.
The University of Pennsylvania, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Materials Science Department is one of the top materials programs in the US and prepares students and post doctoral personnel for employment in the materials industry world wide, and in for the academic research community. The University of Pennsylvania has world class research facilities located in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Dissemination of results is through education and preparation of graduates for employment in industry and academia, and through publication and presentation to the scientific community.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is administered by the University of California for the US Department of Energy. It has a staff exceeding 2000 people, which includes a complement of investigators jointly appointed from the UC-Berkeley campus, and many graduate student assistants. The materials sciences department, in which the complementary work for this proposal will be housed, includes world class research in materials science, which encompasses work on metals, ceramics, polymers and electronic materials, as well as materials chemistry and condensed matter physics. This department also houses the National Center for Electron Microscopy and the Center for X-ray Optics. The latter has led to significant advances in microbeam technology used in numerous applications in the Advanced Light Source, which is a synchrotron largely devoted to producing beams for surface science studies.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) is one of the four campuses of the University of Missouri system. It is the only university in the western Missouri offering graduate and professional study at the highest level. UMKC's programs focus on visual and performing arts, health sciences and urban affairs. UMKC prepares scholars for the challenges of the 21st century through model undergraduate education and an emphasis on graduate and professional study, including an innovative Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. The Department of Physics is one of the seventeen academic departments within the College of Arts and Sciences. The Department excels in both teaching and research as well as in community services.
In the Laboratory of Professor Garofalini at Rutgers University both computational and experimental techniques to determine the structural and dynamical behavior of oxide and nitride surfaces and interfaces are used. Computationally, the molecular dynamics simulation technique is applied. For that work, there is available a suite of 8 SGI workstations, as well as access to large-scale parallel processors at Rutgers and national facilities. In addition to the molecular dynamics code, data analysis routines as well as graphics code enable dynamic graphics visualization. Experimentally, there is surface analysis equipment (XPS, AES, ISS), an air-liquid commercial SPM and a UHV-SPM, with both STM and AFM capabilities, two attached sample preparation chambers, and in-situ deposition and cleaning capabilities. The lab is a part of the Department of Ceramic and Materials Engineering, which has ~80,000 sq. ft. of lab and office space, ~$35M of research equipment, and an annual budget of ~$8M. There are ~100 graduate students and post-doctoral associates and ~90 undergraduate students. Within the Department is the Malcolm G. McLaren Center for Ceramic Research, which has formal links to ~20 industrial firms to whom research information is disseminated semi-annually. In addition to publications and presentations at various materials related meetings, research results are also incorporated into graduate classes covering surface properties of ceramic materials and molecular behavior of glasses. In addition, the Department and lab have a history of visiting scientists with whom research results are shared.
The above analysis demonstrates the enormous intellectual and infrastructure resources that this consortium of researchers brings to the project. The effort put into focusing these outstanding resources onto this important technological problem could reap enormous rewards for the manufacturing industries of the EU and US.
The European partners are the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Insitut fur Metallforschung (Germany), the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) and the CEA Saclay (France).
The University of Oxford is a leading teaching and research University with major interaction with industry. Its Department of Materials (which is the link with this application) is ranked 5* (highest) in the UK research assessment exercise. The University is increasingly bringing its research outputs into the production phase, most recently through the £23m Begbroke Business Park opened in 2000. The Department of Materials has a large presence on that site, which also houses incubator businesses and several SMEs.
The research of the Department of Materials is coordinated around three themes – modelling, characterization and processing. It has an extensive array of state-of-art microscopes and a modelling laboratory all available to this project. The participants in this project are Professor Cockayne FRS, who leads a research group (including Dr G Moebus) in developing characterisation techniques of high spatial resolution, and Professors Adrian Sutton and David Pettifor FRS, who have one of the world’s leading modeling groups and who interact with materials scientists on an enormously wide range of materials
The Max-Planck-Institut fuer Metallforschung is a research institute in the field of materials science. Approximately 500 employees and students work in seven departments. This number includes personnel of five chairs at the Universität Stuttgart which are directed as joint appointments by the directors of the Institute. The research area covers all aspects of materials science such as preparation, characterization, property investigations, and theory of metallic and ceramic materials. The concept emphasizes inter? and transdisciplinary research in the field of the fundamental principles, while at the same time promoting interaction with application and direct co-operation with industry.
The mission of the University of Karslruhe is excellence in research and teaching. The central laboratory of the institute for ceramics in mechanical engineering (IKM) is investigating structural materials based on silicon nitride and silicon carbide for more than a decade. The laboratory is well equipped with all modern facilities for powder characterization and processing, sintering and microstructural characterization. A unique dilatometer system for a hot isostatic press which could operate up to 2000°C and 200 MPa pressure has been developed. This technique allows studies of the densification behaviour and the optimization of a sinter-HIP process for various kinds of materials. In the case of silicon nitride, complete densification of ceramics containing only 2 wt.% yttria is achieved. To our knowledge this is still the minimum yttria additive content ever used for complete densification by HIPing without glass encapsulation technique. The group is working on the development of new silicon nitride based ceramics for cutting tool applications together with the company CeramTec. Since the beginning of this year the University of Karlsruhe established a new center of excellence for investigating the possibilities of using alumina and silicon based ceramics as structural components which are tribologically and thermally highly loaded. This center of excellence is financially support by the German research foundation. The IKM has further activities on the development of ceramics with a well-defined porosity and permeability by using colloid processing method. Other research topics are thermal barrier coatings and the preparation and electromechanical characterization of piezoelectric ceramics based on lead zirconate titanate (PZT).
Part of the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique), CEA/DSM (Division of Material Science) is a major research organisation based at Saclay in France, which has a strategic aim to continue to be a major participant in the national and European research and higher education system. CEA-DSM is heavily involved in nanosciences. The "Oxide group" involved in this project is part of the department of Physics and Chemistry of Surfaces and Interfaces and has expertise in the field of oxide surfaces and nanometric layers. Main research topics are: oxide/oxide growth and nanometric oxide layers, as well as glass surfaces. The laboratory is very well equipped. The experimental tools are surface science methods, such as XPS, LEED, RHEED, electron spectroscopies. An MBE chamber fitted with oxygen plasma assisted MBE and RHEED, connected with XPS and LEED chamber is available. An XPS spectrometer equipped with multidetection channeltron (high signal/noise ratio) is also available. We are used to performing experiments at the synchrotron facilities: LURE (Orsay, France), ESRF and ALS (Berkeley).